BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN THE COMMUNITY AND THE END USER. THE STORY OF SPARK.

For the past few years the office of the CTO at Acquia has been compiling feedback from customers about Drupal’s strengths and weaknesses compared to Drupal's competitors. Acquia's enterprise prospects and clients have provided a unique window into the most common feature requests that arise in choosing a CMS as well as the requirements (often unmet) of people in their organizations who use Drupal every day.

The result of this was a set of features that could be considered indispensable to an enterprise level CMS. We quickly realized that the biggest issue—and the place where Drupal lagged furthest behind—was the content authoring experience.

In this session we'll tell the story of how the Spark project began, the process we took to develop new features, how the other initiative leads and the community in general responded to the features we introduced in the D7 version and how we worked together to revise, improve and ultimately commit many of those features to Drupal 8 core.

1) The promise of Spark:

• How we gathered requirements from the enterprise about Drupal’s strengths and weaknesses measured against other systems.
• What the requirements were and who was ahead of us in meeting them.
• Who the Spark team is and how we came together to make Spark a reality.

2) Spark meets D8:

• How the Spark team brought the innovations we had been working on for Spark D7 to the D8 core development process.
• How the community “kept us honest” by standing up for accessibility, extensibility, responsiveness, and usability—which are not always enterprise priorities—and how we worked together to make those things happen.

3) Lessons learned:

• What went right: How we worked well together and what processes and tools made collaboration easier.
• What went wrong: When communication broke down and why.
• What we can do better: Systematic ways we can improve our culture (both at Acquia and in the community) to increase productive collaboration.