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Overview
Blueprint is a lightweight way to track the progress of features and ideas, from initial concept to implementation. Using Blueprint, you can encourage contributions from right across your project's community, while targeting the coolest ideas to future releases.
With very little administrative overhead, Blueprint helps you to create a roadmap for your project and stay up to date with the status of individual features.
To enable Blueprint for your project, follow the Change details link on your project overview page and select the This project uses Blueprint option.
What is a blueprint
A blueprint is a simple specification. It describes an idea - such as for a feature or process - and tracks enough metadata to show who's involved and any implementation status.
Let's take a look at what information makes up a blueprint:
Title and summary: some ideas are simple enough to express fully in the summary.
Link to further information: this can be any URL and is usually a wiki page where the idea or feature is fully explored. Launchpad doesn't provide a wiki facility.
People: who's working on this blueprint? You can optionally track the person drafting the blueprint, the assignee and the reviewer.
Drafting status: how well has this been discussed? Is it still just an idea or is it ready to code?
Implementation status.
Related bugs: link to any bug reports tracked in Launchpad that will be fixed or otherwise affected by this feature.
Code branches: while you're working on the implementation, you can upload/register branches your code branches in Launchpad and link to them from the blueprint.
Subscribers: people can subscribe to receive email updates when the blueprint changes. There's also an atom feed for each blueprint.
Dependencies: which other blueprints must be implemented before this one?
Launchpad Blueprint leaves you to manage your project in the way that you want. It imposes no project management structure but instead makes it easy for you, and your project's community, to suggest, develop and implement ideas and features.
People: roles and responsibilities
We saw above that there are certain roles associated with each blueprint. Anyone can take any of these roles and anyone can set who is in any of those roles for a particular blueprint. That makes it very easy for members of your community to suggest new features and track their progress for everyone else to see, without requiring special permission.
However, to allow projects to plan future releases, Launchpad restricts who can prioritise and target blueprints and bugs. As you'd expect, the project-group and project owner have these permissions but Launchpad also allows owners to grant them to other individuals and teams. Launchpad calls this delegated role the "driver".
Drivers
Drivers come in three flavours:
- project group
- project/distribution
- project/distribution series.
Each driver's permission to target and prioritise trickles down the hierarchy, so, for example, project-group drivers also have driver permissions for each project within the group and each series in each of those projects.
As a project-group, project or distribution owner, you can set drivers by following the Appoint driver link on the relevant project-group, project, distribution or series overview page.
Subscribing to blueprints
- Feeds Like a bug report, you can target a blueprint to a future release, assign it to someone to work and
by targeting features to future releases.
Anyone can create their own blueprint, opening your project to ideas from your community.
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