[sldev] Just askin': How are we doing?

[Able Whitman]

>
> Dunno, three months fixing stuff doesn't sound so bad to me.  It can
> even be quirks or even just a general priority or policy that steers
> people (and from what I hear, Lindens pick their areas and tasks pretty
> much by themselves).


 Yes, that's exactly what I mean by setting priorities and finding a
balance. You can't build coherent features without having a policy that sets
your direction, and you can't be most effective at fixing bugs (at least not
in a large software project) without some overall guidance.

I know software development in cycles.  And one of the cycles ultimately
> is focusing on stability.  I really don't know how things work inside
> Linden Lab, and what motivation drives people (from the management down
> to the junior coders), but I've spoken to a lot of residents and the
> user's comments on my blog speak for themselves also.


>From what Cory said at his last town hall, something like 65% of the devs
are focused on bug fixes. That sounds pretty much like a focus on stability
to me, but of course development cycles differ, so perhaps my particular
kind of development lifecycle experience has biased me.

I have no reason to doubt what Cory has said, and I can only assume that
most of the remaining 35% of people are working on decentralizing the SL
architecture, which in itself is a big bug fix in terms of scalability,
reliability, and performance.

Well, if people are not seeing stability as progress ... umm, I guess then
> a project is in trouble.


That's not what I'm saying; of course stability is vitally important, and I
think LL has acknowldged that, even if they're not moving as fast as we
might like. (Although I suspect that what we would always like is for them
to be moving faster.)  All I mean is that I don't think the incremental
benefit of shifting from 65% bug fix work to 100% bug fix work would be
worth the lost time in larger architectural improvements I don't think you'd
see 35% more bugs fixed, or see fixes take 35% less time to implement.

A year may be long, but personally I see no problem with a quarter if
> the prospect is right.


But that's the trick, though, right? Putting more people onto bug fixing is
only part of the solution. The other part is that communication runs both
ways, and the if the residents can help point out which bugs are the most
painful and the most important to fix, then the Lindens can more effectively
direct their efforts to addressing those bugs.

I agree that the signal-to-noise in the blog comments (and even the forums)
about bugs and pain points is actually pretty high. JIRA is sometimes a pain
to use, even if you're familiar with bug tracking tools; it's downright
daunting if what you're expecting is "click here if you're having trouble
with group IMs not closing" or something like that. There's definitely
improvements that can be made on both ends of bug reporting, but my
perception of the rate of fixes is that lately it's been much higher than in
the past, and that is definitely a Good Thing.
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