The purpose of this document and the Jira issue tracking system that goes with it is to help keep users of OFBiz informed about the near term directions that are planned for the project. In some cases you may see planned timelines for specific pieces of functionality. In general the presense of a feature or idea in these resources does not guarantee that it will be implemented, and the exclusion of a feature or idea from this document does not mean that it will not be implemented.
There are many factors that are taken into consideration when deciding what will be implemented next in Open For Business. The strongest factor that decides what will be implemented and when is sponsorship for a specific feature. If we have a client that is willing to pay for certain functionality and who doesn't mind it becoming part of the open source project it will most likely happen. While major components are rarely started this way, most of the features in OFBiz are the result of user sponsorship.
The next strongest factor is contributions and issues from the community. As a core team of moderators we try to reasonably evaluate all contributions and incorporate the ones that truly enhance the project. Some contributions require heavy modification and sometimes bug fixes before we can include them in the project. In general it takes time to evaluate and incorporate contributions, so we appreciate your patience with this and we thank you for your willingness to contribute to OFBiz. We also try to resolve issues that are brought up by the community as quickly as possible. While some issues fall outside the scope of the project or are really feature requests that may take a great deal of time to implement, most issues brought up are resolved quickly.. We have received hundreds of contributions and issues from the community and they have resulted in countless improvements to the project.
The third strongest factor is functionality that the core team is interested in developing. As we have free time we do what we can to improve the architecture and tools that are used in the project, and we expand the applications to try to fill in major gaps. In some cases this has been the strongest factor given that it is how OFBiz and most of the major modules in the project got started and it is how major new modules and components are generally introduced.
The fourth factor that influences our decision of what to implement next is feature requests from users or even non-users of the project. While many of these requests are elevated because of higher priority factors, these requests often get very little attention. Of course, if a feature request comes in for something that we already think is important it will increase the chance of that getting done in the near future. While we do want to try to help members of the community, we have limited design and development resources so we have to be somewhat careful about where we use them.
OFBiz uses the Jira issue and development management system to keep track of things that are happening, that have happened, and that will be happening in the project. If you would like to see what is going on, or would like to participate and contribute to OFBiz this tool will help you do that.
Now that you are excited about it and interested in it, you can access the Apache OFBiz Jira Server at https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ.