[WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?

[William Pietri]

On 06/12/2010 01:27 PM, Cenarium sysop wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Amory Meltzer<amorymeltzer at gmail.com>wrote:
>    
>> There was always going to be a bit of Damned if you do, Damned if you
>> don't; It's just unavoidable in a community this large.
> As I'm actively involved in the preparation of the trial, I assure 10 days
> is short. Most people don't get involved until a launch date is fixed,
> especially in this situation where we had to wait for a year with nothing
> coming so people just waited for something consistent to get involved. And
> now we need to quickly find consensus on remaining policy issues, write
> documentation, etc. So I wouldn't have preferred that it be launched later,
> because we've waited enough, but that the launch date be given at least 3
> weeks in advance.
>    

If that were an available option, I surely would have done that.

However, pursuing the fastest possible schedule pushes against 
predictability. If you want greater predictability, you either have to 
invest more resources in trying to see the future, or you add cushion to 
your schedule, to increase the chance the actual release date matches 
your guess. The former means less effort in actually making things, 
which slows down the project. The latter tends to push back the launch date.

So for future projects, the community should definitely keep in mind 
that asking for something ASAP means lowered schedule predictability, as 
well as increased project risk, greater chance of bugs, and minimal 
feature sets. As in so many realms, with software you can get anything 
you want, but not everything you want.

William