[dmd-internals] Planning software?

[Michel Fortin]

Le 2012-01-19 à 11:02, Andrei Alexandrescu a écrit :

> I honestly am giving up on this. I won't even look at other suggested products. There seems to be no shared vision of what kind of organization we need and even no consensus that we need better organization. To summarize my understanding:
> 
> 1. Walter is (a) opposing trello, (b) not enthusiastic about changing much, (c) working kindly on particular examples discussed here (e.g. the oldest bugs).
> 
> 2. Don is already organized in his approach to fixing bugs and doesn't think adding some project planning software would help.
> 
> 3. Brad's opinion is that we're having a social issues that tools can't solve, and brings as evidence the fact that we don't use all features of our existing tools. Brad is not a strong participant in terms of code but is a key contributor of logistics and infrastructure.
> 
> 4. Kenji is too gentleman to participate. I personally think his work is so awesome, if anything I'd be afraid the introduction of whatever tools to disrupt it in any way.
> 
> 5. Leandro has the strong opinion that we don't need additional tools. He's not a massive participant to D but I mention this because he argues his point very passionately. I'm looking forward to equal passion in participation to D itself.
> 
> 6. A few others thought they'd give it a whirl and joined trello. We have a project there with two items and a few tumbleweeds.
> 
> Given this state of affairs, it's very unlikely we're poised to operate a change of significant impact.


The problem with settings milestones is that everyone need to feel constrained by them, otherwise they are meaningless. More generally, what's needed is a way to take decisions and have everyone accept them. But before agreeing on a solution, the problem needs to be understood by everyone.

My understanding is that there is so many problems to fix everywhere that everyone is focussing on a small aspect and no one really get the whole. Like a giant castle that need to be repaired and extended, someone needs to draw a high-level map of it and then mark all the problematic areas and those that need to be built. Once you have that map you can plan a roadmap.

Is bugzilla providing a good enough overview? Would it work better with another tool? Maybe, maybe not. That's not important: pick the tool you want and try to draw an accurate overview of all aspects of the language, making everything that needing a fix or further development. Pick a drawing program if you need to. What's important to make the biggest flaws stand out. Once everyone can visualize the big picture, it'll be much easier to have everyone agree to a roadmap.

So adding a new tool is not the point of the exercise. The point is to have a better overview, a better understanding, so better decisions can be taken and agreed by everyone, and thus acted upon.

Sorry if I stated the obvious.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/