Re: Octave Task List: proof of concept

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On Thu, 2014-02-20 at 08:02 -0800, fgnievinski wrote:

> By vision I meant what this tool should look like, not what its contents
> should be.
> 
> Here's another idea: a detailed roadmap / a group to-do list.
> 
> I found two good examples online:
> <http://typo3.org/roadmap/> -- notice the tabs
> <http://ckan.org/2013/06/24/ckan-roadmap-goes-public/> -- check it out on
> trello

As I understand it, the root problem that you're trying to solve is
that Octave isn't releasing fixes on a predictable schedule? You've
spoken before in the bug tracker about how you want fixes released
very quickly. 

I'm not sure this problem can be solved with webpages or "task
management" written in capital letters. In order to speed up releases
we might need something else, like official "rules" enforced by jwe.
Something that says that you only get a short period of time to submit
fixes to bug reports in release candidates, and then the release
happens, regardless of what state it is in.

We have no idea how much time it's going to take us to implement the
obvious features that Octave needs (GUI, Windows binaries...), and I
think it's ultimately dishonest to try to come up with these timelines
that you seem to want.

    
http://www.quora.com/Engineering-Management/Why-are-software-development-task-estimations-regularly-off-by-a-factor-of-2-3

What we want to be able to do is release more frequently, but we've
been cautious about releasing when we know the software is not doing
what we want it to do. Perhaps we should just discard this caution.

> A question is: what is the target audience for this tool?
> Is it only for making it more inviting for newcomers to contribute?
> Or can it serve existing developers as well?

What existing developers need help with the most that doesn't require
too much technical knowledge is keeping the bug tracker tidy. We don't
need tools to help us promise that we'll be improving Octave on a
timely manner. That's a promise we can't keep anyway. I think ad-hoc
things like a simple wiki page are all we need:

    http://wiki.octave.org/Roadmap

- Jordi G. H.