Subject: RE: Topic: Just Works and 1.0
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Fri May 04 2001 - 00:19:50 CDT
paul> A. "Ship it" ... Include the feature, even though it only
paul> half-works. B. "Next release" ... Leave it out, and release it
paul> when it Just Works. C. "Stall" ... Hold this release
paul> indefinitely, until it Just Works.
This is not enough granularity, because different people have
different perceptions of what "half-works" means. I doubt that
"half-works" and "just works" are opposites. Here are three
definitions that immediately spring to mind. It wouldn't surprise me
if others on this list were actually thinking something different from
all of them.
1. "half-works" means it has a bunch of bugs, maybe crashes, maybe
doing non-intuitive and/or irritating things instead of what
people really want.
2. "half-works" means "not complete". For example, if we had a
tables implementation that didn't let you vary the thickness of
the border lines, that would be a surprise to some users, but some
percentage of them would say, "I don't care about that" and some
other perecentage would say, "I care about that, but I guess I can
live without it for a while longer".
3. "half-works" means "not complete" like above, but the
incompleteness is more random and unpredicatable. If we didn't
have variable table borders, that would seem incomplete. If we
had variable table borders except on the left sides of cells and
tables, that would be incomplete and kind of incomprehensible no
matter what technical challenge led to it.
There's are variations of #2 that are the developer versions of the
given user version. They are:
2d-i: Incomplete, but there is an architecture that makes it look
like a simple matter of coding to get all the way there as time
permits.
2d-ii: Incomplete, and the architecture makes it look like adding the
rest of the feature will require a lot of ripping and
rewriting.
Really, I don't think it makes that much sense to talk about
complicated things like tables or notes and citations as single
features. They're really a composite of interwoven featurettes. They
can quite often be implemented a few featurettes at a time with a plan
for the whole thing. In fact, in my experience, the ability to
decompose the implementation is one of the signposts that point to a
good design and architecture.
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
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