Improving quality

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Hello,

Our design decisions would be implemented more smoothly
across teams and would be of better quality if more people on
these lists were able to participate in the upfront analysis
underlying these decisions.

To improve the situation, we propose that each week, someone
like Kim or Jim should gather from and publish for each team
an abstract of the problems being analyzed and a reference to
a mailing-list thread discussing them in due depth.

We suggest the terms:

* "each week", because the discussions should happen at the
  same rate that our implementations progress.

* "Kim or Jim", because they handle much inter-team
  communication, have an excellent global view.

* "an abstract", because we want everyone to benefit from
  the discussion.

* "a reference to a mailing-list thread", because we need:
  - to hold discussions that extend beyond in-team cliques
  - a medium suitable for articulated technical conversation

This proposal could be implemented by extending the usual
"I did..." weekly reports with "We need to..., so
how about..., finally, please give me your ideas at ____."

When posted to devel@, these summaries become the natural
seed for design threads.

Eating our own dog food, we hereby invite discussion of the
question: "how might we best improve the quality of our
design process?"

   Bernie and Michael