There's been a lot of talk lately in cross-project-issues-dev@ (search for "must-do") about the relative merits of having a set of enforced rules for participation in the annual release train.
If you'd like to void an opinion, here's a poll.
Re: the requirement for more frequently updated New & Noteworthy documents, I'm amazed how many people object to being told they need to better market their projects. Really, that's all a N&N is -- a digest of what's important to convince people to upgrade to your latest efforts. (In Modeling we employ a mix of manually created copy & screenshots w/ automatically-generated lists of bugs closed by milestone, release or individual build.)
If project leaders & committers don't see value in writing marketing copy to showcase their efforts, then why do their employers see fit to pay for marketing/branding/sales people to sell their products? Given that sales people are driven by dollars, would they bother if it didn't work?
Bottom line: Believe in what you do, trust that it has value, and talk it up once in a while. Sure, it's effort, but it's worth it.
2 comments:
There's value in good Javadoc, good wikis, a good home page, a good download page, good tutorials, a project file set, and so on. But none of those are required to meet a high standard. Why not? Surely no one would claim those aren't good things, so let's require them all! There's also value in fixing bugs, addressing features, blogging, answering newsgroups, and so on. Let's require all those too. I can think of lots of great things we could require, so let's keep that bar rising!
Then again, maybe accurate release notes with a list of bugzillas that have been addressed is sufficient for tracking progress and doing an excellent marketing job shouldn't be a make or break requirement.
Yeah, that's why I voted 2+3+4 on the poll. Great things to have, and everyone should have them... but I'm not sure they should be MANDATED.
That said, a list of fixed bugs is like a changelog. Great if you're looking for 'did bug X get fixed, and when?' or 'when did that regression happen?' but craptacular for marketing new features in a release to newbie users.
(Of course if the new release is just bug fixes, not new or noteworthy features, then, well, maybe it's sufficient.)
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