Fedora Features Process

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 16:41 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> The engineering cycle is rather short as it is with the freezes.  Rather 
> than take time away from engineering the features that we want to get 
> in, why not simply defer gathering this info until after the feature 
> freeze as we do now?  The information gathered will be much more 
> accurate than basing our information off volatile plans during a hard 
> date-driven cycle.

But if everyone just goes off and does their own thing, then we end up
with no coordination and just a pile of bits.  The idea of having things
defined up front is many-fold
  1) You have an idea of things that people are working on.  This can
help in getting feedback or suggestions that could improve it
  2) You get people interested in it.  And perhaps even helping out
  3) You get some idea of areas that are going to need testing so that
testers can build up experience and knowledge about the area
  4) You generate some excitement around what's being worked on

All of these are important.  And yes, some things that are planned
aren't/won't make it.  That's fine.  By tracking them, we should be able
to know _sooner_ that they're in trouble so that others can either jump
in to help out or so that we can not have expectations set that
something is happening when it's not.

Jeremy