MORE or less; closing chapter

[Andrew Abernathy]

> Next, I propose that the OO developers estimate and tell us how much ‘time’
> would be required to implement features that we deem important.
[...]
> OO developers, are you willing to participate in
> this, at least in the resource estimation portion?


Very unlikely, I'm afraid.

-- We don't want to be that transparent for competitive reasons.

-- We need the flexibility to start with abstract requirements and design 
a solution that satisfies those requirements, rather than simply copies a 
specific request. And usually most of the time related to a specific feature 
is defining it to our satisfaction and addressing the user experience, rather 
than simply bunging in something that can minimally be said to meet the requirements.

-- It accentuates the opinions of the more vocal users, when we have to balance 
our priorities. It's very easy to think that a feature is very important because 
several users really really want it, but if it's going to take a month of 
development and testing and documentation, plus future regression testing 
time, and maybe it dilutes the core usability of the application, is it really 
a good use of that time, verses a less-cool/less-dramatic feature that actually 
benefits far more users?

-- Personally, I don't want to expose my estimates to public ridicule - it 
encourages me to underestimate things, which is not actually good for the 
project. (Comments like "I'm not a developer, but I know some and I know this 
can't take long" do _not_ make me want to post my estimates. Hey, I'm a developer,
  and things often take longer than I think they should. Sometimes it's my 
fault because of a poor estimate, or because I wasn't as productive and I 
should have been; sometimes its because of bugs in the Cocoa frameworks, or 
architectural issues in the app that require more substantial work to address 
than would ideally be needed.)


Believe me, people's requests get seen, get tabulated, get written up (thank 
you Brian), get reviewed. But some people are going to be disappointed - we 
simply can't do everything that we wish we could as quickly as we wish we 
could. (Although we are working on improving that.) No-one is more sorry about 
that than Brian, although he tries not to hold it against us too much. The 
developers also use the app, and we sure miss features. But we don't always 
get what we want - other features or bug fixes get priority, for any of a 
number of reasons (for instance, a lower-priority feature may get done because 
we're working on a related higher-priority and it makes sense to do both at 
the same time, both for design and implementation reasons).

-andrew