vision creation

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 6:03 PM, Lydia Pintscher <lydia at kde.org> wrote:
> Heya folks :)
>
> One of the points that became very clear during the analysis for my
> thesis was that we need to work on defining our vision and mission
> more clearly. To do this I have prepared a wiki page with a few
> questions that should help us along the way.
> Please add to the page _within the next week_ whatever comes to your
> mind. There are no wrong or right answers.
> Next week I will start looking through what we collected and depending
> on the result we'll figure out the next steps.
>
> http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/VisionCreation   Let's do this! :)

I think that this a really good initiative, not only for your thesis,
but for Amarok in general.

One thing that I would like to emphasize is that we should focus more
on *quality*. Amarok has all sorts of awesome features, in fact it has
so many that I doubt any of our developers knows or uses them all.
However, the sad truth is that this quantity also leads to a lack of
quality, as we simply do not have the manpower, nor the motivation,
for maintaining all of these wonderful (and sometimes obscure)
features properly.

In Agile software development, which is pretty close to how FOSS
development works anyway, quality is given higher priority than
quantity. If a feature cannot reach a certain level of quality, it
should simply be cut out, or put on hold, until it reaches the
required quality. This conflicts a bit with our "Release Early,
Release Often" strategy, but I think we need to find a point where
both strategies meet somewhere in the middle.

Can we remove already existing features that do not work well? We can,
but it usually causes huge uproar in the user community. To my mind
comes for instance our Audio CD support, which is rather sub-standard,
or in many cases not working at all. If we removed that right now, it
would create very negative feedback. On the other hand, noone has the
time and motivation for fixing it up. So I would prefer to invest more
time into making the decision whether to include a new feature, or
not, because later on this decision is very hard to undo.

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer, Senior Software Engineer at Nokia
Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe
http://amarok.kde.org - http://fsfe.org - http://nokia.com