To the EnergyPlus and OpenStudio user communities,
For the past two and a half years, DOE has been using a service called UserVoice to collect ideas on how to improve the EnergyPlus energy modeling engine. https://energyplus.uservoice.com/ has been available through the https://energyplus.net/ Feedback tab. The EnergyPlus development team has received over 100 enhancement suggestions through this service and has also posted internally generated suggestions to collect feedback. UserVoice voting feature has been used to help prioritize new feature development. The OpenStudio development team has used UserVoice in a similar way.
Although UserVoice has been useful in EnergyPlus and OpenStudio development planning, lack of integration with GitHub-the hosting and version management service used by both projects-has resulted in awkward manual copying of information from UserVoice to GitHub and back. With some recent updates to GitHub itself, we feel it is time to consolidate and streamline the communication channels for these projects.
GitHub Issues and Reactions
GitHub is a popular environment for software projects, especially open-source ones. Targeted at developers, GitHub is accessible to everyone and increasingly caters to users. One useful and GitHub feature is Issues which is used to collect, sort, assign, and track bug reports. Here is this morning's snapshot of the EnergyPlus GitHub Issues page https://github.com/nrel/energyplus/issues/.
[cid:image004.png at 01D3AFC0.67AD7940]
Issues can also be used to discuss and track new feature requests in addition to bugs. Unbeknownst to you, or perhaps beknownst to you [Ed: how can there possibly be an unbeknownst without a beknownst?], the EnergyPlus and OpenStudio teams have been replicating UserVoice suggestions as GitHub Issues so they can track all of their tasks in one central location.
When you click on an Issue, you are taken to a page that contains a description, code examples, and ensuing discussion. Here is the page for the first issue in the list. The picture highlights one of GitHub's new features, Reactions, which allows users to register their feelings with ... of course ... an emoji.
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Issues can be sorted by number of reactions of different types, creating a mechanism for voting. Here is this morning's list of open Issues filtered by the label "New Feature" and sorted by the highest number of "Thumbs up" reactions.
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And here is the same list in real time
Migration
With Reaction-based sorting providing a suitable replacement for UserVoice voting, the EnergyPlus and OpenStudio projects will be migrating away from UserVoice over the next month. The existing suggestions on the UserVoice sites will be migrated to GitHub. The site administrator will provide a link to the new GitHub issue in the comments for each UserVoice suggestion, triggering an alert for everyone following the issue. The UserVoice sites will no longer be accessible after March 31, 2018 and are closed to new content effective immediately. If you want to suggest a New Feature, you will need to create in GitHub Issues.
Registering reactions and creating new issues requires a GitHub account, so if you don't already have one please create one now. GitHub is a free, no-spam service. When creating a new issue-either a bug report or a request for new capability-please follow the provided template to thoroughly describe your suggestion. Members from the respective development teams will work with you to help clarify and categorize/label your idea.
Thanks for your continued interest in these projects!
On behalf of the EnergyPlus and OpenStudio development teams,
-Amir
Amir Roth, Ph.D.
Technology Manager, Building Energy Modeling
Building Technologies Office / EERE / US DOE
O: 202.287.1694
http://energy.gov/eere/buildings/building-energy-modeling/
