How can I know what's new in a new version of the plugin

Communication out of the plugin team has dropped off considerably.  Alexander used to do a very good job at keeping us updated - was active on the blog and forum.  We've not heard from him since April which makes me wonder if he's still involved with things or not.

It would be nice if the plugin team had a public facing person again who could fill in what Alexander used to provide for us.  Starting to feel like the plugin is losing momentum...

Maybe communication is not perfect , but the plugin has few bugs, and has improved a lot.  It is very useful, and has non blocking bugs. :).
This plugin is for me the main reason from switching from Eclipse to IDEA.

Don't get me wrong - I rely on this plugin for my day to day job and it has improved quite a bit.  I would never consider using Eclipse for Scala development and in the user group I run, I always demonstrate IntelliJ and promote its usage.  And it would seem most Scala devs in the group use this plugin and not Eclipse.  However, along with these improvements came a lot of communication from the team as to what was next, etc.  Now its nealry radio silence.

It takes more than 10 seconds to run a single junit test in a very small playframework SBT project with IntelliJ Scala plugin enabled.

Even when no file is changed since last run.

I guess this is because Scala plugin is unable to reuse SBTsession and must initialize it from scratch each time a new Make is invoked.

Also IntelliJ compiler does not have the capability to enhance the classes with playframework specifics so classes can't be used for playframework runs.
Playframework class enhancer seems to depends on SBT, see https://github.com/playframework/play-enhancer/issues/6

For me this much waiting time with each Make is a blocking bug :)

Is everyone just used to waiting this much time for each test run or most of the devs are just using activator instead of IDEA to run the tests?

Hopefully SBT with server support will solve this and Scala plugin catches up with that quickly.

We have such problem with Play projects, I hope it will be resolved soon as right now the best workaround is to disable Make in IntelliJ IDEA and use console only.
Server will solve this issue, but I hope we will find better solution earlier as sbt-remote will be released not earlier than end of this year.

Best regards,
Alexander Podkhalyuzin.

We just automated this process with nightly builds like this one: https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/SCA/Nightly+Scala+Plugin+Fixes#NightlyScalaPluginFixes-1.5.200
It hard to say this process works now, but we are on the right way (to deliver more information about new releases).
We are also working on dialog inside of IntelliJ IDEA, so when you upgrade to new Scala plugin version (release), you will get information about new features, important fixes just after IDEA restart.

Best regards,
Alexander Podkhalyuzin.

Communication requires lots of efforts (and it's growing with userbase) and small focus changes makes communication a bit more problematic (this time it was conferences).
We are working on possibilities to improve communication like sharing responsibility, automation process, but it's not instant process and requires some time and effort from teammates. I think we will not lose momentum so everything will be ok:)

Best regards,
Alexander Podkhalyuzin.