Hi Jann,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and for your kind recognition of my work ☺️.

Contributors burn-out quickly because of the nature of the BP dev process

I’m sad to read the above words, and your point on the leadership of the project because I must be one of the people responsible for these consequences.

I started as a BuddyPress contributor before joining the team as a developer and now as one of the lead developers. I think everyone in the team just like me are considering ourselves as contributors first and we know how strategic contributors are to the project. I think we’re in the middle of vicious circle : contributors need quick feedbacks but we need more contributors to be faster. I try to review each submitted ticket, patch or PR on our SVN/Git repositories but sometimes it can take me a long time.

I’m very open to suggestions on ways to improve our development process so that contributors can quickly realize their impact on the code.

Unlike businesses who are customer-focused, BuddyPress is user-focused, but we need to satisfy various types of users. I partly agree with you when you write:

BuddyPress can be described as developer-focused.

Because one of our users is the BuddyPress plugin or theme developer. Each time we add a change to the source code we need to think about potential backward compatibility issues. This can also explains why some huge changes like the feature we packaged into the BP Rewrites plugin can take a long time. We actually also care a lot about the end users – caring about plugin/theme authors – because we want to make sure to take the less risks as possible for their community site. When something goes wrong into the community areas of their site, BuddyPress responsibility is their immediate guess.

About :

The BP volunteer devs work on things that interest them

Well, I’d say it’s a human nature, we like to work on interesting things 😇. But we’re an open source project and as such every user is a potential contributor / developer, what about doing some steps? I and everyone in the team will be happy to help them improving their work to finally have a solid feature shared with all users.

Thanks again for your feedback 👍