On 6/17/15, Eran Rosenthal eranroz89@gmail.com wrote:
Sometimes programmers waste their time for implementing non-useful/non-important features, but sometimes such features aren't just not useful, but harmful.[1; you are more than welcome to convince me otherwise]
Both developers, designers and project managers should always ask themselves why do we need such feature before going to implement it and should be able to convince others on the motivation for it.
I think that sometimes we fail… (and sometimes even in the "postmortem" step[1]) The question is how can Wikimedia foundation improve the process?
For large changes there are already reviews and RFC on mediawiki wiki, but for smaller ones it is sometimes missed (and even phabricator ticket). Should any feature should be associated with phab task?[2]
Eranroz
Well its no doubt its true that feature creep is a thing, and unnecessary features are harmful (and harmful in long term not immediately ways). The bug more reads you got in a dispute about if a particular feature is in scope for VE. Establishing whether a specific feature is useful seems to be somewhat orthogonal to establishing general practises to reduce feature creep. General practices should be based on generalizations about many bugs/features, not one specific thread about one specific feature which could very easily have arguments made in either direction about its appropriateness.
Should any feature should be associated with phab task?[2]
I don't think absolutes are good. And I don't see much point of having a phab ticket for a small feature where nothing is needed to be tracked for implementation or anything else. If issues arise and something needs to be tracked, then phab tickets can be opened later. That's not to say small features shouldn't be challanged. By all means challange them, but if there's no phab ticket open yet, its easy to open a new one. Ultimately though, phab is not the place for extended debate (imo. OTOH people want to use it for everything now a days).
--bawolff