PSARC 2008/625 - Streamline ARC 20Q

[James Carlson]

John Plocher writes:
> In my book, a project team that utters that sequence of phrases is 
> really telling the world that they need help, that they are not yet 
> able to do the job being asked of them - which is to develop software 
> for a world class operating system.  We need to find better ways of 
> working with them to help enable them to do better.

It sounds to me like you might be expecting at least some teams
(perhaps "many") to be fully conversant in all of the Best Practices.
I'm not sure that's realistic.

I expect to see that project teams understand their technical areas
very well.  I also expect them to understand a fair amount about
adjacent areas.  I don't necessarily expect them to understand
_everything_ about _everything_, particularly at a system level.

That's where those (sometimes silly) enumerated questions from the ARC
come in handy.  Project teams don't necessarily think about patching,
or README documentation, or contracts, or security requirements, or
clustering, or versioning, or a host of other things.  In fact, I
expect that gap to be the norm, and addressing the gaps to be part of
what the ARC should do well.

Sure, it'd be wonderful if everyone coming to ARC review was a
renaissance developer, but I doubt it works as a general goal.  There
are just too many details for us to say "go read everything on this
web site and come back."

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive        71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
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