GitHub starts publishing roadmap of future features

Microsoft’s trashing the place, clearly. Or is it?

Poll GitHub has announced it will henceforth publish a public roadmap of current features.

The Microsoft-owned code bazaar says it’s traditionally “shared forward-looking product announcements at major events or in the occasional blog post”, but that it feels the time has come for more regular and formal disclosures.

Hence the new roadmap expressed as a project board that outlines future features the service intends to deliver.

It isn’t rocket science. The board lists a new feature’s next release phase – alpha, beta or generally available – explains which area of GitHub’s services it belongs to and the SKUs it will be attached to. Deployment models may be listed too, but GitHub says if that’s missing “features will generally come out cloud first, and follow on server at or soon after GA.”

The GitHub roadmap project board.
Click to enlarge

GitHub’s senior veep for product Shanku Niyogi said the company has decided to release a roadmap because “As customers have gotten used to us shipping new things, we’ve also heard you clearly tell us that you’d like more visibility into what we’re working on, what we’re going to be shipping, and when.”

But he also warned that the roadmap won’t be “exhaustive”, but “will include most aspects of our product plans and will be regularly updated.”

Which is not vastly different to Microsoft’s practice for Windows and Office 365, products for which it publishes a roadmap and offers lots of opportunities to test early releases, while also springing the occasional surprise.

Before Microsoft announced its intention to buy GitHub, Reg readers overwhelmingly opined that it was a bad idea.

And now? Feel free to consider the poll below, dear readers... ®

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