Plugin Author Experience Improvements Summary

[piachakra]

Goal: Create a robust plugin ecosystem for plugin authors. This goal relates to our second OKR.

Objective 2: Solidify and improve extensibility to enable Octant to become foundation for wide family of products
Key Results:

• Reduce the number of Slack questions and open issues regarding plugin creation by publishing comprehensive and accessible documentation
• Adjacent VMware team can leverage the extensibility of Octant in order to establish a shared specification for plugin creation across Octant and Tanzu product

We were interested in exploring the following "How Might We" scenarios through conducting user research:

1. HMW... improve the plugin experience to increase number of published plugins, therefore increasing adoption of Octant
2. HMW... increase awareness of Octant's power of extensibility so that users know that they can publish and install plugins for added value

We interviewed the following plugin authors to gain insights about the as-is process and identify gaps:

• Michael Stergianis - VMware Tanzu Engineer
• John Harris - VMware (former Heptio consultant) "hobbyist developer"
• James Stratchan - Jenkins x OSS Engineer
• Mengdie Song - Antrea Engineer

After interviewing the users, we organized common insights into themes through affinity mapping. Then as a team we prioritized the themes that will have the highest impact on our goal/OKR. We chose to focus on the following efforts:

1. Improve Example Plugins
2. Increase Plugin Awareness
3. Improve Components

We conducted a design studio to brainstorm different solutions under each effort and did not yet finalize solutions. Ideally final solutions would be broken down into epics, then issues. All details are contained in this miro board.