User interviews mentioned in the previous community update were carried out by Eriol & Jana. I couldn’t find the transcript of the interviews but I guess all instances who have participated got the information?
Information out of the interviews helped us to update the list of needs.
Since then, the team changed and we had to pause our roadmapping exercise to focus on delivery.
We are slowly picking things up again.
This post is here to update you on where we are today. It’s published in a closed section of our forum because some fundings are not reading to be public yet. We need to work on another format of the roadmap for wider communication.
Horizon 1: What is the delivery team working on until June?
Before we start… yes we say June, but we are a fully remote team with flexible hours…soooo don’t start communicating “June” to your users just yet 
A little reminder: our pipe is composed of 4 major type of tasks:
-
Features: completely new stuff added to the software! These are considered either mandatory (compliance reasons) or the most HOT topic coming up from our users
-
Tech debt: updates and maintenance stuff we need to carry on to keep our code healthy and secure
-
Sys admin: updates and maintenance stuff we need to carry on to keep our servers healthy and secure (the global team is currently managing 8 servers across the globe)
-
Funded features: More about those here: A proposal for fundraising for features
NB: each week, our delivery team works on these four types of tasks depending on their priority. On top of this the team handles bugs and papercuts, but also critical upgrades we are not always able to plan in advance. This level of detail will not be presented here. If you want to follow our team, checkout our notes on discourse each Tuesday/Wednesday. Or drop by our meeting to say hello!
Back to the main topic: it’s important to note we are still finishing the work on features that were prioritised before the product vision work lead by Jana & Eriol. This means that our current horizon looks like:
A bit more detail on each:
-
Split the checkout: Shoppers’ experience through checkout will be improved by introducing a 3 steps checkout.
Easier to maintain (adjustments are better handled) and compliant with EU ‘s regulations on online checkout.
Also this new checkout isn’t using AngularJS anymore!!! This is a big step towards completely removing this old and scary language out of OFN.
This work is in its final stages. We will soon contact you with more information on the roll-out.
-
Tax reports: First stage on our big reports project. Tax reports will be enhanced. Welcome deeper granularity, hasta la vista rounding errors! [Reports] Tax Totals Report · Issue #6847 · openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork · GitHub
-
Backoffice UI uplift: First step towards Network 2.0 - our product list is getting a face lift. Also AngularJS will be removed from the product list
This will lay the ground for every shiny new experience network 2.0 is about.
Also on the tech side, it will enable us to really start our Styleguide framework (think of it as a catalogue of pre-designed elements our developers can cherry pick!)
Context: Backoffice Product List table user interface uplift -
Removing Stripe connect: with Stripe SCA, we do no longer need Stripe connect. To avoid maintenance costs, we removed it from our code. This is DONE now
-
Active Storage migration: our images and attachment are handled by a little gem (tool) called Paperclip. Paperclip is deprecated and needs to be replaced by Active Storage. This will enable us to keep our AWS buckets updated as well. More on that: Migrate Paperclip to ActiveStorage · Issue #6347 · openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork · GitHub
-
OIDC authentication: This is funded by the Data Food Consortium project. First step into more interoperability is to ensure we can authenticate users and share only their data - when they agree to it. OIDC is a web standard that allows users to login on apps. As this is a first prototype, instances will be able to choose whether or not they want to activate OIDC. Also note that we will only handle login for accounts which already exists. You can do account creation with OIDC, but this is out of scope of this funding.
-
Customer API v1 endpoint: this is funded by AU, UK and a little bit by FR. It will result in our first v1 API endpoints with all information related to our customers. More info: [API] Customers Endpoint · Issue #8787 · openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork · GitHub
-
DFC product API: next steps (funded by DFC project + AU and UK) are around getting our product catalogue on the API and handling create/update/delete actions! This means we need OFN API product endpoints to be updated in v1 first!
-
Linking order cycles to shipping and payment methods: funded by CA, US, UK and FR, we will be able to tag shipping and payment methods to OC!
Have a question? Don’t hesitate to drop it here in the thread 
What will happen after June?
Well… we still have some compliance work to do. In particular: History of invoices changes and numbering system: in the EU, invoices should carry the history of order changes and have a numbering system fitting requirements. On the bright side, we won’t have any more support requests starting with “I swear I haven’t deleted anything on the order…those eggs really disappeared!!”
Our reports project needs to go forward : especially improving packing reports, and reports used to pay producers (among many other things the product team needs to tidy-up and order! 
)
Network phase 2 needs to kick-off.
Aside of this a number of needs seemed to reach a consensus after the user interviews (this is not a priority order):
Speaking as a hub manager
- I need to send alerts to my customers
- I need to have an alert when max orders is reached in an OC
- I need to manager stock info from producers
- I need to adjust orders
- I need to process refunds in bulk
- I need to propose discounts and vouchers
- I need to let my customer pay with credits
- I need to have donation options at checkout
It’s a bit too early in the process to tell you how everything will set to music for horizon 2. Yet a lot of instances are depending on a high level roadmap for their funding applications! This is partly why the product team is working in parallel on the relaunch project: https://community.openfoodnetwork.org/t/a-proposal-for-an-ofn-relaunch/2459
More info to come soon on this!
and estimations on when Horizon 1 will be done are tough. Let’s see if we can finish for end of September.
.
