[OLPC-devel] Good engineering practice

[Mitch Bradley]

Folks, I'm starting to get really frustrated.

Coming up to speed on this project has been challenging because the 
communication is so haphazard.  Issues just "float around in the air" - 
on IRC and devel list conversations that diverge wildly from the thread 
topic.  Finding out the history and status of a particular issue is at 
best time-consuming, and on average nearly impossible.

I posted a plea for using trac and suggested that two specific issues 
should be moved there because they need to be tracked.

But instead, people immediately started discussing those two issues on 
the mailing list *under the thread about engineering practice*.

Call me a stick in the mud, but I know this for certain from involvment 
in  lot of projects:

Disorganized projects do not converge, and thus fail to meet quality and 
schedule goals.  Failure on either count is usually fatal.

I appreciate that this project has a lot of volunteer labor and that 
many people are borrowing time to do the work.  But that's not an excuse 
for haphazard communication.  On the contrary, if you want your time to 
have been spent meaningfully, the project needs to succeed.  And that 
requires convergence on issues, which in turn requires disciplined 
communication.  And disciplined communication saves you, and everybody 
else, time in the long run.

Any issue or question that probably requires a change to the hardware or 
software should be moved to the bug tracker, and further discussion 
should be via that medium.