Unfortunately most tickets are happening as FREEI (internal) tickets so you can’t see them. That said most of the discussion related to design were typically laid out in a google doc and loosely summarized in tickets. If there was a design decision it typically happened in slack. These decisions were usually what fields, icons or other cosmetic things typically.
So I guess what I am saying is you can’t see alot of tickets anyway and if you did they probably wouldn’t give you a lot of insight.
I know in Asterisk most taske in the public tracker are cloned to a private tracker. When I was developing internally FREEI was for commercial modules and all other traffic was in the general tracker so we didn’t have a process to clone tickets.
I’ve made my thoughts about development and QA on this project pretty clear in other threads in this forum so I won’t rehash them here. I will say that the lack of proper QA and the severity of some of the bugs I’ve seen in the last year has been alarming. Not only have we seen recent regression of a major exploit happen but a bug in the Core module back in the start of 2021 completely blew out Advanced Recovery and warm spare setups causing the spare servers having their configs completely messed up. In a nutshell, it broke entire recovery/backup setups.
I now have clients that I manage/support their FreePBX systems now no longer do updates on their own because they have ZERO TRUST in the updates. It’s now on me to validate that they can update without having a bug break their call flow and/or systems.
This exploit regression and other issues happening are a burden on the users. It’s adding actual costs in regards to usage (due to calls being made) and that users now have to basically blow away their systems and rebuild them from scratch to ensure the hackers are cleared out of their boxes.
But honestly this kind of stuff was more forgivable 10 years ago due to what the project was and how it was evolving. Now, this is completely unacceptable as FreePBX/PBXact is being pushed as a viable business solution with all its commercial modules, fancy IoT addons and attempts to integrate into other business applications for synergy.
I think one of the biggest problems is the fact that core crux of FreePBX hasn’t changed from its initial purpose, the Asterisk Management Portal. In other words just a fancy GUI for managing Asterisk configs because in the end, you really need to understand Asterisk and its settings (what they are, do, etc) in order to fully understand the majority of options you see in FreePBX. Which, again, 10 years ago was fine because the people installing it were mainly power users or those with technical proficiency. However, in modern times the amount of non-technical people using FreePBX because it is pushed as a viable business FOSS solution has increased. I would even venture to say it has surpassed those with technical proficiency.
I like the idea of using the forums for general design discussion and other topics as well and keeping bug related discussion on bugs (so that there isn’t the problem of cross-medium communication loss). There’s already a development category (which is being used on this post) that should be used for development level topics. My vote is to keep using it as such.
FREEI tickets are usually for commercial modules bugs, customer bugs, or stuff that hasn’t gone public yet due to things not being announced yet, the last case being the minority of their usage. Pretty boring stuff most of the time.
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