An analysis about a generic desktop application configuration management system

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 13:36 +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> 
> I propose using the typical software development cycle:
> 
> 1. Customer makes a requirement
> 2. Analyst makes a use-case
> 3. Customer signs that document
> 4. Analyst makes a functional analysis 
> 5. Customer signs that document
> 6. Analyst and programmers make a technical analysis
> 7. Customer signs that document
> 8. Analyst and programmers sit together to talk about the implementation
> 9. Programmers implement it
> 10. Customer now wants documentation
> 12. Documentation plan, writing documentation
> 13. Implementation and deployment
> 15. Bugfixing and maintenance
> 16. Etcetera 
> 
> We are just at the first stage: gathering the requirements. 

I think this is your basic problem.

1. Open source doesn't work this way
2. This is the widely-discredited "waterfall" model anyhow; 
   something more iterative would be better even in a 
   non-open-source-context
3. In this case we've already done a number of iterations and
   widely tested things and have solid understanding/feedback
   from that

What you need to do is a) listen to the past experience b) start writing
some iterations of code.

Havoc