[WikiEN-l] Flagged Protection update for May 13

[William Pietri]

On 05/14/2010 04:23 AM, AGK wrote:
> Thanks for the update William. It seems like we're getting very close
> to release now, which is great to hear.

We're very excited, too.

> On 14 May 2010 06:25, William Pietri<william at scissor.com>  wrote:
>    
>> we will be getting
>> together with Rob H. and the rest of the ops ninjas to discuss release
>> dates.
>>      
> Are you referring to the developers? Suggestion: just set a firm date
> and have the dev's do it by then. My understanding is that we have
> some on payroll, so ultimately there's little need for a discussion if
> the only benefit is more time-wasting.
>    

In this case, we're just looking to get on the ops calendar. Picking an 
arbitrary date is reasonable when you have flexible scope, but for as 
long as I've been involved this project has always been looking to 
release with the absolute minimum necessary for starting the trial.

With that kind of product plan, picking an arbitrary date means you have 
a high risk of either releasing without the minimum feature set or 
taking a hit in code quality, which has to be cleaned up later. Either 
of those wastes time, so we've waited until we were pretty close to done 
to start formally talking with ops about a release date. We have been 
casually talking with them, though, so they are aware of what's coming, 
and I expect things will come together nicely.

One consequence of launching with a minimum-necessary feature set is 
that after launch, a bunch of people will say, "Why didn't you do 
[obvious feature X]?" Some will say that nicely, and some will say that 
as if we were fools for missing such an obvious improvement. At that 
time, I'd love it if everybody who has been pushing (quite rightly) for 
the soonest release possible will help us explain that additional 
features would have meant later release dates.

William