Space
The intelligent code collaboration platform
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Space 2021 Roadmap
Check the scheduled Space feature release status and track our latest priorities on the Space Roadmap page. The information on that page is updated on a regular basis.
During the EAP/Beta program, we received over 35K license requests and 25K organizations joined Space. We’ve been collecting feedback from our first customers through live interviews, surveys, our issue tracker, support requests, and other channels. We want to say huge thanks to our early adopters. You have helped us tremendously! We’ve listened to your feedback, and in this roadmap for 2021 we’ve focused on addressing your requests.
With the first public release of Space, we have been focussing primarily on supporting the workflows of software development teams. Space includes all the tools required to support the software development lifecycle: Git hosting, code reviews, automation, CI/CD, package management, quality gates, and merge requests. The software development tools are combined with planning tools, issues, visual issue boards, collaborative documents, and communication tools.
We’ll continue to polish the software development workflows, and we also plan to expand our support for the workflows of other teams, including Marketing, Design, Sales, HR, and Legal. Our goal is to meet the needs of all the different teams within your organization. Let’s take a look at what’s coming to Space in 2021.
On-premises Version
We’ll be focusing on delivering an on-premises version as soon as possible. We understand that for many companies keeping the organization’s data in-house is crucial. We’re planning to provide a migration path from Space cloud to on-premises. This means you can start testing the cloud version of Space now, and then seamlessly transition to on-premises when it becomes available.
Cloud
We’re planning to add support for several hosting regions, including the US and APAC.
Localization
Localization is also one of our priorities for the near future. We understand how important it is to collaborate in your own language.
Video Calls
Video calls have become crucial for keeping teams connected, and they must be included in a collaborative environment. We’re planning to provide support for video calls in Space, both built-in and through integrations with external tools.
External Collaborators
We’ll be adding support for the possibility to include external members, people who are not members of your organization but can be authorized in Space with a limited set of permissions. The external member role can be used for product stakeholders, customers, or partners. Our first step is to add support for external collaborators in the Chats channels and project artifacts, including documents, issues, repositories, and package artifacts.
Dark Theme
The Dark theme allows you to reduce screen glare and use Space with a more subdued dark background. It is supported on both the web and desktop versions. Dark theme is already available in the mobile apps as part of the native iOS or Android settings.
Space Drive
Space Drive is a single place to store all your Space Books and various file types. We also plan to make it possible to attach files, such as images and gifs, to documents.
Collaboration
Collaborative Work On Documents
We’re planning to support more collaborative workflows for different types of teams, including Design, Marketing, Sales, HR, Legal, and more. Collaborative work on documents is of central importance to many teams. We’re planning to support the process of creating and managing specifications, functional requirements, campaigns, roadmaps, and legal agreements with formal reviews (similar to a code review process).
Project Documents
Documents are the knowledge base for your projects, and a home for your product roadmaps, technical and functional requirements, marketing and business plans, campaigns, and so on. To enhance the experience of working on Documents, we’re planning to add:
- Notifications for when a document is created or updated.
- More granular permissions for documents and folders: view-only permission and options to share documents using a link.
- Documents live preview.
- Support for unfurls in WYSIWYG:
- Replace links to Space entities with their names, including links to member profiles, teams, locations, documents, and so on.
- Unfurls and previews for external links and attachments.
- Text editor improvements:
- File attachments, images support, and embedded videos support.
- Autocompletion of Space entities, including blog posts, issues, users, teams, and locations.
- Support navigation inside the document (anchoring links).
- Pasting formatted text from various sources.
- Import documents from Markdown files. Import a zipped folder with .md files and convert it to a Book with the same folder structure as the original.
Calendars
Integration with external calendars is our main priority for this year. We’ve divided the process into three steps:
- Integration with personal calendars (CALDAV): connect Space to your personal calendar on iOS/Android so you can let your colleagues know when you’re unavailable and maintain a good work-life balance.
- Integration with video call providers, including Google Meet and Zoom: schedule a meeting from Space, with a notification that includes the link to the meeting in Google Meet or Zoom.
- Integration with Google Calendar/Outlook: use your Space calendar and another calendar simultaneously. Whether you create a meeting from Space or from Google Calendar, both calendars will be updated.
Project Calendar
The Project Calendar contains the meetings related to the project that include the project team members as participants. Create a new meeting for the project team with one click. In the future, we’re planning to add more events to the project calendar, including milestones, releases, deadlines, and more.
Notifications
We’re working on notifications about meeting events, including invites, updates, and cancellations.
Chats
We will continue to enhance Chats in Space to make it a one-stop-shop for all the information streams inside Space, the improvements we have planned include:
- Push notifications in the web version, including tuning and improving the algorithms for delivering notifications to various devices and apps.
- Availability statuses: working hours, availability hours, and mute notifications during the meetings.
- Priority channels that ignore the muted status in certain conditions. For example, it’s critical for the DevOps and the Support teams to be notified about major issues immediately.
- The option to push a notification even if the recipient is unavailable.
- Support for longer posts on the web version and mobile apps.
- Mentions history tab where you can see all your mentions or mentions of your team in one place.
- Previews of the content of uploaded/shared files: word, google docs, and pdf attachments.
- Authorized Unfurls: an application that is authorized in Google or another content source that allows you to unfurl private content.
- Unfurls from Figma, YouTrack, TeamCity, and other external tools.
- Optimized view for issues and code reviews in the chat list. This will allow you to see which issues and code reviews were resolved, or hide them entirely.
- You will be able to perform actions on certain entities, such as closing issues, accepting code reviews, and more, in corresponding chats, including on mobile.
- There will be an option to create subscriptions to aggregated and/or shared feeds.
- Enhanced chat input completions and mentions. Autocomplete more Space entities in chat with fuzzy search.
Software Development
Git Hosting
- Git CDN support.
- Improved GitHub repositories mirroring: synchronization with GitHub merge requests and comments.
- Regional replication to provide faster access to your repositories from various geographical locations.
Code Review
- Code review UI and feed enhancements: distraction-free mode (full screen changes view), filter resolved and unresolved discussions, and inline/expand threads in code reviews.
- Quality Gates enhancements:
- Auto-merge: when all the conditions and checks are passed successfully.
- Code owners: introduce the code owner permission for certain directories in the repository. With this permission, the approval of the code owner is required for changes to be pushed to this code.
- Integrate post-approval checks: this step would allow you to temporarily merge your changes to the master branch in order to test them automatically. The changes would not be permanently merged if the tests are failed. The tests can run inside Space Automation or external CI/CD tools (Jenkins, TeamCity, CircleCI). If the tests pass successfully, your changes will be merged to master.
Automation (CI/CD)
We will continue to enhance the CI/CD process.
- External workers: support for external workers (Linux, Windows, macOS), allowing you to run your automation workload on local resources.
- Kubernetes workers: support for running your automation workload on on-premises Kubernetes.
- Non container steps: non container steps for running scripts on the host machine.
- File artifacts: publish file artifacts, allowing users to publish and download files, such as archives, rather than just specialized packages in Automation jobs. This should be helpful for mobile development (.apk) as well as for publishing generated reports (zipped xml, json).
Deployments
Deployments allow you to organize the infrastructure around your deployment process. The process itself may happen inside or outside Space. The main idea is to ensure the integrated and automated process of collaboration and communication about your deployment process. This involves integrating it with Chats and combining notifications from various services into a single stream, supporting integration with Calendars, and integrating it with the VCS.
Also we’re planning to:
- Support multi-repository builds so you can set up your Automation scripts to work with several Git repositories.
- Re-work Docker support (docker-compose, vanilla docker, kaniko).
- Support more triggering events.
- Support reporting test execution results for Go, .Net, and more.
Later, we hope to have time to work on two other big features:
- Pipelines
- Local execution of jobs from IntelliJ IDEA, Space CLI
Packages
- Maven publishing to remote repositories as well as Maven Central.
- Remote repositories: cache packages in Space from remote repositories.
- Cleanup policy: specify rules for auto cleanup of packages in the repository.
- Support for Python and PHP packages.
- Import packages from an external repository to Space. For example, we want to provide a convenient way to migrate packages from Bintray, since it is being deprecated.
- Support signed packages: NuGet, Docker, Maven.
- Integrations: searching for Maven artifacts in IntelliJ IDEA, sending webhooks about package events.
Project Management
Issues
We understand that issue tracking is fundamental for project management. We are going to enhance Issues to provide a more robust way to track your tasks and progress, while still keeping it as lightweight as possible. We’re planning to add:
- Custom fields to support priority, type, severity, estimation and other types of parameters you need to support your business process. Custom fields will be supported in filters, search, and the API.
- Sub-tasks that you can use to break down your features and user stories into smaller chunks so you can track progress better and work on several tasks in parallel.
- Time tracking with the option to estimate the time a task will require, along with the option to record the time spent on the issues and report it to stakeholders automatically.
- Connect issues with related commits and merge requests: view commit messages in issues, link merge requests to issues and vice versa, and have the issue status updated automatically when the code review status is changed.
- Swimlanes for better support of Scrum practices.
- Advanced search using smart queries with completion and suggestions.
Checklists
We believe supporting checklists through other Space entities makes sense. Combining checklists with the calendar and setting due dates for your checklist items, integrating checklists with issues as subtasks, and making checklists a part of the documents are just some of the possibilities we are going to be working on.
Team Management
We’re planning to introduce a profile feed that includes all the recent changes made to issues, documents, code reviews, blog posts, commits, memberships, and so on. We’ll also provide an option to import your member profiles from various file formats (.csv, .xml, .txt, json), as well as from Active Directory.
Extensibility
Our team is actively working on making Space more extensible. Right now we are exploring the following:
- Full support for Marketplace and private applications.
- Even richer HTTP API, which will be better documented (everything that can be done in the interface, and more, should be exposed via the API).
- Webhooks will be customizable and will support most of the events that happen in Space.
- Incoming webhooks – for example, notification feeds for external applications, Google Docs, Jira, and YouTrack issues.
- More interactive message workflows, including forms.
- Extensible menus and UI customization to connect with the external apps or add more internal linking. For example, we plan to add the ‘Create a merge request’, or ‘Create Jira issue’ option to the Issues menu.
- Support for iFrames. For example, we want to add an additional Design section to the Project to show Figma mockups of the project inside Space.
- Local chatbots and workflows (arbitrary Kotlin scripts that Space runs using its Automation infrastructure).
- Custom object storage to keep additional information for your application.
Mobile Apps
Space mobile apps are Chats-centric. We’ll be polishing Chats and providing support for working with issues, documents, and code reviews from them. For example, you’ll be able to open an issue from a Chats notification and view its history, and you’ll also be able to read and write comments.
IDE Integration
The Space plugin will be included out of the box in IntelliJ IDEA 2021.1, and it will be integrated with the IntelliJ-based IDEs in subsequent versions. The Space plugin will enable you to:
- Perform code reviews with merge requests.
- Edit Automation scripts with Kotlin plugin support.
Toolbox Integration
We’re adding Space to the JetBrains Toolbox to allow you to sign in to your Space organization from Toolbox, list your Space projects inside Toolbox, and more.
Share Your Feedback
This is our plan for the directions we’re planning to take Space in 2021. While designing this roadmap, we’ve tried to address as much of your feedback as we could about the features you’re missing in Space. Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment below or by posting a feature request to our issue tracker.
Space is now publicly available. If you haven’t tried it yet, you can sign up at any time for the free plan with unlimited users and start exploring with your team or entire company.
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