Chris McMahon wrote:
Most software projects fail (for some definition of
"fail"). Even for
highly skilled and highly experienced companies and shops, most software
projects fail. I'm not going to look up the Gartner and Forrester and
Chaos reports this late on a Monday night, but google away.
GSoC is an investment that is not intended to have a short-term payoff.
The fact that ANY GSoC code makes to production is fantastic.
GSoC is an investment in the long term. It is intended to provide real
concrete experience to promising students in real environments, including
all the frustrations and annoyances that everyone on a software team
experiences in the real world all the time. Schools simply do not provide
that experience. Some fraction of those participants will take those
experiences into the future of software development, to make real
improvements, both to code and to process.
Thank you for this. You make some good points.
So I guess it might just be a matter of better managing expectations of all
parties involved? The disappointment factor is serious and dangerous, in my
opinion. It can be mitigated by setting appropriate expectations for the
students involved, the mentors involved, and the end-users involved, many of
whom desperately want to see some of these features live.
Furthermore, considering GSoC solely in terms of
benefit to
Mediawiki/Wikipedia is short-sighted. Take a look at the organizations
participating:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/projects/list/google/gsoc2012 . What
would your opinion be if WMF were not on that list?
Personally, I don't care very much about being a participant for the sake of
being a participant (and I imagine many others feel similarly). I think for
a lot of people who watch these Summer of Code projects, it _is_ about
benefit to MediaWiki/Wikimedia, particularly as getting involved in these
projects can detract from already painfully finite mentoring and reviewing
resources.
MZMcBride