> Here is my suggestion: Could you mail the list with a *weekly summary* > of your current decisions (e.g. after the weekly IRC meeting)? > > That would help tremendously!
This would also add some serious overhead, that, unless being paid for, I would not just do because I can. > You are working with time-based releases. Naturally, there is a bit of a > rush for the dev team just before a release to get some more bugs fixed. > This is absolutely fine for small, well defined bugs. But hurried > decisions wont help the overal design of Schooltool. Bugs are usually not critical decision making. > I think it would help a lot if educators could join the brainstroming > and sketching phase, especially since now that there is a concrete base > application that users are starting to relate to. From my perspective -- the paid developer -- Tom is my task provider and he tells me how he wants something done. If he asks me of my opinion, I will give it to him, but ultimately it is up to him to make the decisions on the features implementation. The brainstorming of actual educators is a totally different level of discussion that could be easily done in parallel to the development. Note that the general rule of thumb is: The customer does not know what s/he wants until s/he sees the product. And this is pretty much always true. > It would be fantastic if you could place idea outlines & design concepts > on the website, or better even on a wiki? My argument is that in order > to arrive at a user-friendly application overall, you need to enable > participation and critique when you are still ordering your thoughts / > when you are in early design. If you plough away coding, only to > discover - after a full month of hard work - that you missed an > important related user requirement for a particular feature, this turns > into a disappointment, for both "sides". That's not true. We are using agile programming techniques, which recognizes the fact that requirements always change and thus software always changes. Regards, Stephan -- Stephan Richter CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student) Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
