Professionalism in the development version (was Re: Artwork shuffle?)

[Matthew East]

-> sounder.

On Sun, 2006-04-16 at 18:15 -0400, Ivan Krstic wrote:
> Matthew East wrote:
> > Everyone using it knows there is some
> > element of risk in using it, but if we are going to be _this_ extreme
> > about discouraging people from using it, then we are not going to get
> > many testers, and the OS will suck more.
> 
> Extreme? I spoke about the operating system eating chocolate, for crying
> out loud.

Not only, you also said "wipe your partition table". Sure, your tongue
was partly in your cheek, but your view was clear: use the development
version and the user loses a right to complain when things go wrong. I
don't completely disagree, I was simply pointing out that an attitude of
that sort will inevitably lead to fewer testers. More below:

>  My tongue was firmly in cheek, but my basic point stands;
> while it'd be very bad for any OS release to do nasty things to one's
> system, a strong expectation that it won't cannot be bestowed on
> anything but a stable version. The same generally holds for other things
> perceived as "release professionalism".
> 
> > The testing community is a fundamental part of the growth and quality
> > assurance of the project, and some attention has to be paid to not
> > alienating that community.
> 
> I've found that there are broadly two types of people who test
> development releases. The first are hacker types

{snip}

> The second is the impatient user type

{snip}

> No one wants to alienate the testing community -- they provide an
> invaluable service to software development. But the second group has
> unrealistic, mistaken expectations, and it's a waste of resources to
> cater to them, alienation notwithstanding.

Well, you said "broadly", I suppose, but it's pretty wrong: these are
not the only two categories. For example, lots and lots of Dapper users
are using Dapper because they care about the quality of the next
version, and make the call that this is worth risking using a
development system. I'm one of those users, and there are lots of
others. Now, the size of that group pretty obviously depends on the size
of the risk. If developers are heard to say "use the development release
and you lose the right to complain when things go wrong", then I think
the obvious consequence is that the testing community will decrease in
size, which would be a shame.

I don't think this is something the developers do, at all. In fact they
are generally extremely good at supporting and encouraging the testing
community, which is why it flourishes.

Also, it's clearly a question of degree: you wouldn't expect the
development version to have reached a high degree of professionalism at
an early stage in the release cycle, for example. And one wouldn't
expect the developers to go to a disproportionate amount of effort to
fix bugs which will only occur to people who installed the development
release. But, all I am saying is that there is a minimal amount of
expectation by users of the development release, which is not
unreasonable.

The artwork question isn't really a good example, because it doesn't
affect functionality at all. I had in mind more something like if
openoffice.org writer broke, you'd expect it to be fixed quite quickly
so people can carry on doing their regular work. However, I'm not at all
surprised that people have complained about the artwork, because some
people probably feel that it is an unnecessary eyesore. On the other
hand, for most people, it will not be a big deal.

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
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