Roadmap and design decisions

When looking at the list of issues for the Gateway on GitHub some people (not me obviously :slight_smile: might think that the design is being driven in an ad-hoc manner by the problems/ideas that contributors have.
Can you reassure me that the top-level design and program structure has a been thoroughly considered? Can you tell us a little more about the design considerations?
Would hate to feel that my wonderful idea about groups of groups https://github.com/mozilla-iot/gateway/issues/1191 would require a major redesign (half joking).

We use GitHub Projects for our planning purposes. All of our planned features, plus bugs, go into our project board. You’ll see the Release Backlog update in the next week or so with our 0.10 plan.

To answer your question, though, we definitely do our high-level planning and roadmap separate from random things that pop up on GitHub. We start every year with a plan, broken down on a quarterly basis. Community contributions, bug reports, etc., get mixed in with that plan.

Keep in mind also that we don’t just maintain the gateway, but the registration server, webthing libraries and a whole host of add-ons as well.

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Thanks for the information - I am reassured :slightly_smiling_face:

Would anyone care to comment on what I wrote in https://github.com/mozilla-iot/gateway/issues/1191
“Please consider implementing groups as a thing so that we can have groups of groups as a thing. Not being able to have groups of groups is a major shortcoming of the Hue Bridge and Google Home. A light fitting with 2 bulbs needs a group, and probably needs to be in a ‘room’ which needs a group, which probably needs to be in the ‘floor’ group, etc, etc. So we build a group by adding things which represent things and/or things which represent groups.”

Before we can get to your suggestion, we first need to implement basic groups. That’s something that we’d really like to have, but I’m not sure yet when we’ll get to it.