[Squeakfoundation]re: TrueType font support and 3.6

[Daniel Vainsencher]

I don't know about the rest of Agile Development, but XP claims that
code is easy to _change_ (not fix) things *iff* up to that point, you
refactored mercilessly, did the simplest things that could possibly
work, and have tests to back you up. If the code in question was
refactored mercilessly, we would not be having this discussion... 

We're not talking about potential bugs here (which additional testers
might flush out, as you say), we're talking about code that hasn't been
improved or pronounced ready by it's author, after recieving a first
review. I don't understand what there is to discuss.

Daniel

Marcus Denker <marcus at ira.uka.de> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 06:04:03PM +0200, Daniel Vainsencher wrote:
> > Hi Andreas - 
> > 
> > I'm confused too. Let's try to isolate the problem.
> > 
> > Claim I - We have a piece of code that's candidate for inclusion. We all
> > agree it has flaws as detected by even cursory inspections. 
> > 
> > Claim II - I percieve as a very obvious, general rule that at every
> > stage of mixing code in with more of the real world, the price of fixing
> > errors goes up, because problems are easier to solve in isolation.
> > Therefore, make it work, make it right, then deploy wider.
> > 
> 
> Problem is: Claim II is wrong. And obvioulsy so: Adding a big
> changeset to Squeak takes a long time: It needs to be reviewed,
> and discussed (image or package?). Most of the time those things
> are pretty complicated, just because they tuch a lot of stuff 
> where not many reviewsers are real experts. So adding big things
> takes time.
> 
> On the other hand: small, isolated refactorings, that fix a little
> thingy at one place can be harvested *very* fast: lots of people
> can review a simple refactoring (e.g. removing a direct reference
> to a class) without understanding the whole thing that was once that
> big changeset. 
> 
> Another thing: Adding even not-perfectly working stuff can be good, because
> it gets tested by lots of people, and most squeakers who
> follow the update stream actively fix bugs they encounter. They
> do this for the stuff in the update stream, not for those big changesets
> that are in the review process.
> 
> So my claim (which is not new btw, it's the basis of the whole "Agile
> Development" Hype) is that it's less expensive to fix things later
> than most people would intuitivly guess.
> 
>   Marcus
> 
> -- 
> Marcus Denker marcus at ira.uka.de  -- Squeak! http://squeak.de
> 
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