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