Hi Daniel,
Daniel Carrera wrote:
Andrew Brown wrote:
I think Peter puts it best: "This kind of thing would NEVER happen this fast with a MS product. I know this seems slow, but it really only took 3 - 4 months of serious squacking to get it changed."
It's good that it's changed -- and it seems to me that the change will be in the m88 builds, which are not quite yet out. But let's not be too smug about MS here. This kind of public beta is what we have to do instead of usability labs. And I think it's obvious that they would change anything that got feedback as bad in the usabilty labs as the castrated quickstarter did.
Also remember that it took 200 votes to have it changed. It became the single most requested feature in IZ before a developer did what ammounted to less than an hour's work.
I don't think the delay was for lack of a developer doing that part, which probably was indeed rather small. (I don't know where you got your number from.)
We have a UI freeze data for a reason. UI changes affect documentation and localization and localization of documentation and screenshots for documentation and possibly more. For that reason late-breaking UI changes, particularly ones that involve changing an approved specification (rather than fixing a deviation from the specification) are done only reluctantly. The hour spent changing the code is not nearly the major part of the effort such a change involves.
A developer can't simply go ahead with such a change until it is approved by all the affected people.
And of course many votes don't necessarily mean that the issue must be done with any urgency or even done at all. First, we don't have countervotes. What if there are 200 in favor, but 2000 against? Second it is probably easy to summon a few dozen or even hundreds of people to raise an issue to the top of the list. Compared to the number of users of OOo or even to the registered project members, 200 is not much. And last in an OSS project no developer is obliged to develop anything on someone else's schedule or priority list. We try to listen to our users, but this includes those users that don't shout loudly in the OOo project. For paid developers their paying customers surely come first, for unpaid ones their very own preferences are foremost.
I think we should expect more responsiveness than this.
And couldn't the developers expect more responsiveness as well?
We go to the trouble to write specifications, which are announced on the [email protected] list. We write feature announcements to the feature announcement lists when the feature implementations are ready to be integrated. But I know of few, if any, cases where interested users have reviewed the specs and provided feedback in a development phase where it would still have been easy. Instead people wait until the entire development effort is through (that is also the time when documentation starts documenting the feature as specified and implemented) and then some. And then, well after the fact, the complaints start coming in and developers are supposed to turn everything that has matured for month over within a few weeks.
We do quite a lot to develop in the open and to allow feedback as early as possible. But often it doesn't come until it is too late. Or almost so.
I don't really complain. We have become used to it. Much of it is simply human nature. But I still find it unfair, if developers are called "unresponsive" on this background.
Note: In this particular case the decision to revert could really have come earlier. OTOH this would not necessarily have meant that it would have been implemented earlier.
Sorry for the rant. I don't want to offend anyone. I rather hope that more people will discover all the wonderful instruments we have for participating in the development process and use them. Of course there is much to be improved processwise. But I really hope that e.g. the new RFE process will get more people involved at an earlier stage for the next release (the one after 2.0).
Ciao, Joerg
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