I agree with Amir’s understanding. "Declined” is basically for ideas whose proper timing is never. Valid ideas that we just aren’t going to work on any time soon should go in a backlog or freezer or some such, where they can await until some future project or other development makes them relevant (at least theoretically).
All of which does raise a slightly different question: I am much less clear on what the exact difference is between “Invalid” and “Declined.” Thoughts?
Best, Joe _____________________
Joe Matazzoni Product Manager, Collaboration Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco mobile 202.744.7910 jmatazzoni@wikimedia.org
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
On Oct 2, 2018, at 9:31 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Hi,
I sometimes see WMF developers and product managers marking tasks as "Declined" with comments such as these:
- "No resources for it in (team name)"
- "We won't have the resources to work on this anytime soon."
- "I do not plan to work on this any time soon."
Can we perhaps agree that the "Declined" status shouldn't be used like this?
"Declined" should be valid when:
- The component is no longer maintained (this is often done as
mass-declining).
- A product manager, a developer, or any other sensible stakeholder thinks
that doing the task as proposed is a bad idea. There are also variants of this:
- The person who filed the tasks misunderstood what the software component
is supposed to do and had wrong expectations.
- The person who filed the tasks identified a real problem, but another
task proposes a better solution.
It's quite possible that some people will disagree with the decision to mark a particular task as "Declined", but the reasons above are legitimate explanations.
However, if the task suggests a valid idea, but the reason for declining is that a team or a person doesn't plan to work on it because of lack of resources or different near-term priorities, it's quite problematic to mark it as Declined.
It's possible to reopen tasks, of course, but nevertheless "Declined" gives a somewhat permanent feeling, and may cause good ideas to get lost.
So can we perhaps decide that such tasks should just remain Open? Maybe with a Lowest priority, maybe in something like a "Freezer" or "Long term" or "Volunteer needed" column on a project workboard, but nevertheless Open?
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l