[Libreoffice] Are we back to having this spec process again!?

[Christoph Noack]

Hi Kohei,

you know that I'm both subscribed to this bug, so I feel free to comment
on this - rather from the UX point-of-view (although I know some people
from Documentation, QA, ... who think similar).

Am Samstag, den 09.07.2011, 13:39 -0400 schrieb Kohei Yoshida:
> Regarding this bug
> 
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39068
> 
> Rainer started the specification process for this.

I'd like to say that he offered to write a specification - which is a
bit different from a full-fledged "process". Isn't it positive if
somebody (whoever this is) cares about collecting the information if the
complexity of the issue avoids handling all inside a simple bug report?
Especially if nobody urged him to do so - he already invests a lot of
time for LibO.

As Rainer stated, some of the changes do affect some rather fundamental
definitions within the help - how should the Documentation team know?
And the different example documents showed (at least for me) that
separating the issue from the intended behavior is difficult. If we
change that behavior - how should QA know what to test?

> I thought one thing we decided to do was not to re-introduce this
> over-engineered, time-wasting specification process.  Is this a new
> development in the LibreOffice space?

I welcome if people announce / describe some of the intended changes
without major changes in the visible functionality. But, I currently
perceive a lot of doubled work outside the development team due to the
lack of information.

There are also some examples within Calc where such a lack of
information requires a lot more time for UX and Usability work (although
we lack developers, currently it is Development Power >> UX). However,
bothering the developers for details about the intention, the detailed
behavior or having fundamental discussions in the issue tracker after a
change has been introduced - I think that's tedious for developers as
well. We should avoid that.

> Not to mention I'm very disturbed by this.

I'm sorry that you feel like this - I'm sure this wasn't intended by
Rainer. But I have to admit that some people (myself included) / teams
feel irritated by lacking information (in advance). Maybe this is a good
starting point to re-think how non-trivial changes are worked on ...
switching from Easy to Serious Hacks :-)

Any interest? (Also on another list, in a conf call, or ...)

Cheers,
Christoph