In February we conducted our annual strategic planning meeting between DCC and CDL to discuss joint plans for the upcoming year. We were joined from DCC by: Kevin Ashley, Patricia Herterich, Magdalena Drafiova, Marta Nicholson, Ray Carrick, Angus Whyte, Diana Sisu and from CDL: John Chodacki, Marisa Strong, Catherine Nancarrow, Brian Riley and Maria Praetzellis.

This meeting was a follow up to our 2019  meeting, where we had a chance to meet for three days with our colleagues and we wanted to replicate this in our half day online meeting. This time around we had to swap to Zoom for the lovely city of Edinburgh and only met for a half day instead of three days. Nonetheless, we managed to accomplish some important high level planning discussions regarding the work of continuing our collaboration on the Roadmap codebase. In this blog post we provide you with the summary of what we discussed and share our plans for the coming months.

Over the past months our team has worked very hard bringing DMPonline up to speed with the latest Rails5 codebase. This has been a major upgrade, affecting all areas of the code and, in addition, we have a lot of users with customised pages which we needed to go through  and ensure that DMPonline will work without bugs for all of these. Although this mainly affects the back end infrastructure that is not visible to our users, it is crucial step to future proof the codebase and to get a lot of new functionality to work from which you will benefit like e.g. uploading documents (still to come - #2233). For more post-Rails5 upgrades about the upcoming features which follow have a look  here. In the release notes below I am adding a few pre-Rails5 releases that we had not previously announced to you, providing a short summary with a few highlights. If you are interested in what we are currently working on, check out the current sprint board on DMPRoadmap and the forthcoming development roadmap. You can see full release notes on the DMPRoadmap GitHub repo. We are aware of few bugs that were raised during UAT or from our customer and the list is here.

We recently moved our helpdesk to salesforce which helps us to stay at the top of your request in more transparent way. However, this still does not show you the issues raised by other clients. While we use GitHub to address issues, we do this in a private repository to protect customer information. Unlike suggestion requests to the central roadmap code, this means you cannot comment on top of points already raised by other institutions.

It has been 6 months since we launched DMPonline demo sessions and we decided to ask you again, which demo sessions do you want us to run next and give us any suggestions how to make these to work for you.

We received 53 responses so many thanks to all that took part! Read more to find out what are we planning to work on.