Owner: Rebecka Hall
Roadmap history: 
Selected for Future in Q1 update (Top 3)
Selected for Future in Q2 update
Selected for Future in Q3 update
Selected for Next in Q3 update
Development started Q1 2021

What business value does this roadmap item create? / Which problem is this roadmap item trying to solve?

One of the goals of implementing RevMan as a web application is enabling collaboration on the review. The text editor component (CKEditor 4) that we are using for all text editing in RevMan Web is now used to its full potential. The development team spent a lot of time on customizing it to fit our use case and maintain it. Many reported bugs relate to text editing and the customization we've done to the editor. Any new improvements to text editing such as an inline commenting system or proper concurrent editing that is widely considered to be very valuable are not really compatible with CKEditor 4. 

Complexity of current solution takes developer time

During the last year our team fixed 18 bugs related to the editor out of 73 bugs in total (not all user reported). We were working on 40 stories related to the editor (out of 143 in total) and it's likely they took longer to implement because of the configuration and adoption needed. Removing the constraints from the RM5 format will remove some of this complexity. It was initally thought that moving to CKEditor 5 would also remove some complexity for existing features in RevMan Web (to be confirmed) and most complexity for implementing new off-the-shelf solutions for collaborative features. After meeting with the company that develops CKEditor 5 we can conclude that we will likely need to do more work on our end as there is not a feature parity between CKEditor 4 and CKEditor 5. We will need to learn more to estimate this work. 

An opportunity to improve the editing experience

Moving to CKEditor 5 will mean we can review some areas where several improvements have been suggested by users as we will need to re-implement the functionality:

An opportunity to improve reliability 

Re-implementing the text edit gives an opportunity to increase the automatic test coverage

How can the value delivered be measured?

• New text editing features can be delivered faster

Which assumptions are made in relation to the value?

The CKEditor 5 framework will be easier to work with for the development team and will enable collaborative features in a shorter time frame than if implemented with CKEditor 4.

• Experiment to get proof of concept needed.

What are the dependencies for fulfilling the business value?

• Developer time: Moving to CKEditor 5 includes re-implementing much of the text editing in RevMan Web and so is not a minor task
• License budget for CK editor approved by Christopher Mavergames

What are the risks related to this roadmap item?

There are Cochrane specific requirements that CK-Editor 5 does not support. Areas of concern:

• Performance when many editors are loaded on the same page (Full-text view)
• Table editing is more rudimentary than CKEditor 4, so customization is require

Opportunity cost: during the time of development it will not be possible to do continuous releases (other than bug fixes) in order to give the development team a focus 

What is included in the scope of this solution?

Implementing text editing with CKEditor 5, in-line commenting system, collaborative editing on the same text, improving inserting and re-ordering links, move between words in the spellchecker.

RMW-1066 - Move to CKEditor 5 BACKLOG

Improvements in relation to the current text editing experience will need to be considered on a case-by-case basis after the current behavior has been implemented:

RMW-1839 - Getting issue details... STATUS

How much time do we estimate to implement this roadmap item?

This is a guesstimate made by the Review Production Team based on known information about the roadmap item and the capacity of the team at the time of estimation (June 2020).

Large: 3 or more sprints = More than 6 weeks. High risk of increasing in scope as we learn more.