Fwd: Application of UIFEs

[John Lea]

Forwarding to ubuntu-release,ubuntu-doc,and ubuntu-translators at Iain 
Lane's suggestion.


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Application of UIFEs
Date: 	Fri, 05 Oct 2012 11:28:19 +0100
From: 	John Lea <john.lea at canonical.com>
To: 	product-strategy at lists.canonical.com
CC: 	Sebastien Bacher <sebastien.bacher at canonical.com>, Didier Roche 
<didier.roche at canonical.com>, Jason Warner <jason.warner at canonical.com>, 
iain.lane at canonical.com, kate.stewart at canonical.com, Cristian Parrino 
<cristian.parrino at canonical.com>



Hi All,

Over the past week there have been a couple of cases where bug fixes
have been IMHO incorrectly marked as requiring UIFEs.

UIFEs are an important process step to make sure that string changes are
translated and that users reading documentation are not confused.
However visual bug fixes that do not involve string changes or bug fixes
will not cause any user confusion if the documentation is not updated
should not require a UIFE.

Two of the examples from last week are:

#1043808 - Preview activation doesn't have instant feedback

#1052513 - 'More suggestions' icons in App Lens are too large

In the case of the first bug, although adding a loading spinner is a
visual change, if the documentation is not updated users will not be
confused.  This change also has no translation impact.

In the case of the second bug, making the 'More Suggestions' app icons
in the App Lens the correct size and thus fixing the bad pixelation will
again not confuse users even if the documentation is not updated, and
also this bug fix has no translation impact.

Over zealous application of the UIFE rules increases the likelihood that
fixes to bugs like these will not land in Quantal.  I hope that we can
take a more pragmatic approach when considering which bugs do or do not
require a UIFE, and consider the total impact on all Ubuntu users of
landing or not landing a bug fix, and not just the documentation impact.

For example should we choose:

a) perfectly consistent documentation with badly pixelated app icons in
both the documentation and the App Lens for the Quantal cycle.

b) to fix this bug in the App Lens even though the documentation would
then become slightly inconsistent with the implementation?

A yardstick to help make this choice could be "will the user be confused
by this documentation inconsistency".

Of course the root cause of these problems is how late all the features
have been landing this cycle.   Ideally all the features that are
landing into a release should be complete by Feature Freeze; this would
then give us enough time to really reduce the number of bugs we are
seeing at this point in the cycle.  However this is a different (and
also very important) discussion.

cheers,
John








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