Article on wine development strategy

[Scott Ritchie]

Kai Blin wrote:
> On Saturday 18 April 2009 05:21:20 Dan Kegel wrote:
>> http://yokozar.org/blog/archives/48 is a fun little look
>> at using simulation to see how various strategies
>> might affect Wine development.
> 
> Interesting, but largely academic.
> 

Fair enough.  The fact that growth in applications working and happy 
users is roughly exponential is interesting though, and I think that 
reflects reality.

>> The one that worked out best was to pick some random
>> user who's almost happy, fix the last few bugs that
>> are keeping his apps from working, and then once
>> he's happy, move on to the next such user.
> 
> The problem seems to be identifying these people. The model assumes that you 
> can tell which piece of software almost works, and that you know the almost 
> happy users. In reality, you only seem to hear from the pretty unhappy users 
> and the occasional really happy user. Susan Cragin is about the only user I 
> can think of off the top of my head who's almost happy and could be made 
> completely happy by fixing all of the remaining bugs in DNS.
> 

Well, she seems like a nice enough person, why not pick her ;)

But, yes, it's not very helpful when identifying which bugs are 
affecting a particular app is half the work (and then identifying how 
that API is supposed to work is most of what's left).  Still, it's nice 
to know that, when we do know, it's not a bad stategy to just go ahead 
with it rather than work on something else.

> Also, reality has us deal with the fact that new applications are added while 
> we're working on the old ones, and looking at the graphs, we're only going to 
> make a significant number of users happy when we're about 98% done fixing the 
> bugs. I realize that it's a bit hard to model "rate of new applications with 
> new bugs being added", but that's what happens in real life.
> 

I don't think it's too inaccurate if we imagine the start of the model 
being today rather than 16 years ago when the project got started.  So 
that way we don't have to quite worry about the moving target so much.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie