We have come quite a long way since the first release in September 2014, I've changed from being a developer, to a technical product owner and now a product manager. The product is maturing with a dedicated team working on it daily, and a wonderful community that does their job in collaborating. Looking back, between the first and the second release was almost 1 year, it took us even more than a year to release an equal Java version to the general public. But from then on we sped up development and started releasing something new every 2 to 3 months. So the big question now comes, can you keep up, is four releases each year too little or too much?

I've seen different responses on our latest release, been even asked to push something in a release a few days before its deadline (which unfortunately wasn't possible without delaying the release since we would have to restart the release test process then which contains a few man days of testing effort), but also see questions about and modules on two releases back, indicating people can't keep up with the high pace we have been going. So I would like to use this post to ask you all to give me some feedback on what we have been doing and where you would like us to go. Since DXA is open source, besides you having the ability to make changes yourself, I'm also toying with the idea of giving you (the community) some influence on its backlog and release schedule.

What we have already accomplished is giving the community insight to our development progress. We currently do a nightly sync from our internal stash repositories to the public GitHub repositories. This way you all can see the progress that is made on the development branch (we don't sync feature branches currently, so what we push is in a somewhat stable state on develop, the release branch is always considered stable, updated only after each sprint). Some of the upcoming changes we are discussing is around our openness in issues and backlog. I don't have the tooling yet to open up our complete backlog to the community, but I'll see if I can find the time to copy the most important items and give you all some more insights. That way we can also look at starting a discussion about backlog influence, and see where that leads us.

So the ball is in your court, please give me some feedback about the DXA release frequency or any other suggestions you can come up with. You can use the comments on this article or drop me an email (I'm sure you all know how to reach me ;o).