Drupal 8 retrospective with Dries

Dries, the Drupal project lead, will facilitate a Drupal 8 retrospective discussion at DrupalCon Barcelona.

After more than four years of development, Drupal 8 is quickly approaching its first release candidate. Drupal 8 will be a landmark release of Drupal, with myriad new features and improvements. In addition to many technical changes, we innovated on how we collaborate on the Drupal project, including:

• The adoption of Git for version control (replacing CVS) for more effective contribution and collaboration.
• Seven official core initiatives to re-architect or otherwise improve large areas of the Drupal core code-base: Configuration management, Multilingual, HTML5, Mobile, Web Services, Blocks and Layouts, and Views in Drupal Core.
• A community focus on "getting off the island" and collaborating with other open source projects.
• The core contribution mentoring program, making things easier for hundreds of new contributors and bringing Drupal 8 core's total patch contributors to nearly 3000 (more than three times the contributors involved in Drupal 7).
• A new planned core release cycle using semantic versioning, with scheduled six-month feature releases for faster innovation and long-term support (LTS) releases for stability and backward compatability.
• A dedicated Drupal.org team at the Drupal Association to make faster and steadier improvements to Drupal.org and our automated testing infrastructure.
• The Drupal 8 Accelerate program, to raise funds and provide targeted grants that accelerate Drupal 8's release.
• A new governance policy to evolve and document Drupal core's structure, responsibilities, and decision-making, with the addition of multiple Drupal core committers for faster patch throughput.
• And much more.

Now that we are close to the final Drupal 8 release, it's time to take stock of these changes, of where we've been and how it went. We'd like your input on the following:

1. What worked well? What were the highlights of the Drupal 8 cycle?
2. What didn't work well? What are lessons we've learned for upcoming releases or for the community as a whole?
3. What concrete improvements can we make for future releases (both minor and major)? We welcome suggestions around teams, tools, or processes.

Submit your answers online. Dries will gather the community's responses and use them as the basis for an open discussion at DrupalCon Barcelona.