Cees de Groot <cg at cdegroot.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 13:48, Andreas Raab wrote:
> > Finally (because I'm just at some larger issues) consider dropping the
> > "micro management" approach for larger projects. This just won't work. 
> 
> Hear, hear. We're in alpha mode. We're spending more time on discussing
> stuff to include than writing stuff to include.

If you're spending more than 50% of your time simply writing, you're not
doing your job properly. (And no, this is _not_ my humble opinion. It is
The Law, cos I said so.) It takes time to co-operate with other people
so as to help them do their work better, just as they must spend time to
help you with yours. Time should be spent on documenting stuff so that
it has some value to others; if you can't explain what/why/how then what
possible use is it? If you can't be bothered then what possible use are
_you_?

> Code reviews are good when you're doing nuclear plants, but we might be
> exaggerating here. Especially when it leads to frustration with people
> spending time on projects the community agreed are necessary.
Code reviews are always good because they are the time when other people
get to carefully consider the issues along with you and guess what -
sometimes that leads to dramatically better solutions. It should always
lead to better understanding of the code. And in too many cases I've
noticed that it can be the only time geeks ever bother to talk to each
other!

Now I'll agree that some of this is inevitably relaxed for a project
being done for fun across the world but surely for the crucial central
support systems of the project it is quite important to spend time
trying to make sure that code is reasonably correct, reasonably
understandable, reasonably well described and actually understood by
persons other than the writer?

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- The wheel's spinning but the hamster's dead.