Many of the open source software that I keep an eye on include roadmaps in their external development documents, however I have read very little about the idea of creating roadmaps as tools for development. Part of the reason for this may be that what I have read just refers to roadmaps differently, or I haven’t read enough, or possibly that roadmaps counteract the ideas of agile development. Since there seems to be a lack of input on the subject, I thought I would examine some roadmaps and look at their purpose in Software Development.

Songbird’s Roadmap:

If you haven’t been introduced to songbird I highly suggest you check it out, it is an excellent media player built on Mozilla’s software that allows you to both play and store you’re music as well as explore the web in a musical context. They have published roadmap’s up to and after their release of their non-beta software (currently version 1.1), you can find them here: http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Roadmap. Songbird appears to use their roadmaps as a way of tracking the progress of various large objectives of upcoming releases of their software. They also allow the community to interact with it via comments and the fact that it is in a wiki.

Songbirds roadmap seems to be a resource for the community to see what the development time is being spent on and how far things are coming along. Internally I would assume that it is used in much the same way, a way to track the progress of large objectives as well as pinpointing what the large objectives are.

The Wordpress Roadmap:

You can find Wordpress roadmaps here: http://wordpress.org/about/roadmap/.  Wordpress is an open source blogging platform (I use it for Coding Notes). Wordpress seems to use their roadmaps in a much more specific way than what Mozilla or Songbird does, Wordpress utilizes a ticket system to track the progress of and allow developer involvement in the process of dealing with issues that need to be tackled for certain release “milestones” or versions. As a result there are far more and much more specific items being taken care of on the roadmap, and the entire roadmap as a whole looks much more like an internal document than an external overview of whats going on.

The pro’s of this approach are that the community can get a much more specific view of the changes that are being made, and can perhaps have a more beneficial involvement in the large scale development process. The con is that naturally it is harder to see the overall picture. However by looking at the number of open tickets and closed tickets one can get a very basic picture of the progress (as of this writing for the 2.8 release it stands at: 271 closed tickets out of a total 762 tickets).

Mozilla’s Namaroka Roadmap:

The Namaroka Roadmap can be found here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Namoroka. While Ars Technica calls it a roadmap, Mozilla does not use that name but it is very much the style of a roadmap. Like Songbird’s roadmaps the Namaroka roadmap is a broader overview of the development that needs to take place. However, it differs significantly from the other roadmaps by providing multiple perspectives on what needs to be accomplished for the Namaroka release. What I mean by this is that they have provided multiple sections, a broad overview of goals, a rough timeline of when different items should be completed, and various areas of interest and requirements plus others. This allows for multiple perspectives to be taken on the same things. They don’t provide a way to see what is completed or in progress however, but the document is in a wiki so as the items are accomplished perhaps the document will change. Also like songbird they invite community involvement via a discussion section.

Personal Experience, a basic roadmap from my Senior Project

While I was completing my senior project my team developed a basic roadmap; it was meant mainly as a rough diagram of what needed to be done and a time line of when we could expect things to be finished. However, since we where following a win-win spiral lifecycle model we where working in a risk-driven environment, which meant that whether the timeline said we needed something done or not was purely based on the current biggest risk and not on what the timeline said (however, risk assessment included time constraints). Thus what was really more of our roadmap was our list of current and past risks and their level of significance, this not only showed what we needed to eventually consider but what was currently being dealt with (the highest risk). Unlike the other roadmaps both of these documents where used internally only and where never shown to our “client”. Since our client was also our professor he did see both documents but not as our client, instead as our mentor. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of either documents as neither where stored in our CVS.

Final Analysis: where roadmaps fit in agile development

As I stated earlier I think that one of the reasons that roadmaps are not discussed as a part of the development process as much as other documents are is because they tend to orient themselves more toward a waterfall model or non-agile life-cycle. I don’t think that this means that they can’t be used in an agile process, I do think they must be used differently though. So if you are trying to be agile how to roadmaps fit in?

In agile development more of an emphasis is taken on dealing with what needs to be dealt with than dealing with a specific order that common development tasks must be accomplished in. Thus by creating a roadmap it would seem that you are forcing certain tasks to be accomplished in a certain order or direction. As can be seen with the Songbird and Wordpress roadmaps there is not a specific deadline for the tasks other than the over all goal of the version release date, this allows for the various tasks to be accomplished in any order. Also the Namaroka roadmap does not give individual tasks a deadline but instead outlines a very rough idea of when groups of tasks should become “finished” in each various phase of the development. By not giving firm deadlines for specific tasks it is possible to maintain the agility of the development, furthermore, it is always possible to change dates, and by doing this agility can be maintained.

Along with maintaining flexibility in a roadmap they can be great tools in the beginning of a project by outlining a project and preventing developers from diving too deep too fast, and later on they can help developers still see the big picture while developing small sections of code. The key to utilizing a roadmap in an agile development is allowing change within the document, if it stays static and is the absolute rule to the path of development then it is much more like waterfall development and a hindrance to the naturally changing environment of development. However by allowing it to change constantly (like the risks in my senior project) it allows for the whole project’s progress to be visible without hampering agile development.

Furthermore, as all three of the open source roadmap examples shown above are available to the community, it can be seen that roadmaps can also be an excellent way to provide progress reports to the community (or client) of software projects while still maintaining flexibility. Although, depending on the client it may not be a good idea to reveal as detailed an overview of the actual design elements of a software project as these roadmaps provide.

I am very interested in hearing what others think about this topic, or if you know of any articles or books that talk about roadmaps involved in the development process I would like to hear about them.