[Python-ideas] Iterative development

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 12:25 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
> Single dev hour is ok if you reached your goal. That's the point.
> You set the goals - you reach them. If you didn't reach them - you
> analyze and see what could be done better. It is all in relaxing and
> free manner, unlike the bloody corporation culture. You may invite
> other people to join the fun. People can find what are you working
> on and propose help.
>
> This is the process.

Let's say you pick up something that's going to turn out to take you
three dev hours. You then put one hour of work into it, and the
two-week cut-off rolls around. What do you do?

In the current model, there is no cut-off, so you just keep your work
where it is until you find the time to finish it. Then you format it
as a patch, put it on the tracker issue, and move on. (Or, if you're a
core dev, I suppose you push it, see if the buildbots start looking
red and angry, and then move on. Either way.) It doesn't matter if
that took you one day, two weeks, or three months.

What you're suggesting is that people should conform to an arbitrary
number-of-days cutoff. That means that if the cut-off is getting
close, there's a *dis*incentive to pick up any job, because you won't
be able to finish it. Imagine if, when writing up a post for the
mailing list, you had to finish each sentence inside one minute as per
the clock. If it's currently showing hh:mm:49, you'd do better to not
start a sentence, because you probably can't finish it in eleven
seconds. Is that an advantage over "just write what you like, when you
like"?

ChrisA