Meeting Notes -- 13 Mar 2003

When & Where

• Monday 13 Mar 2003 -- 4:15 to 5:00
• OSAF office in Belmont

Who attended

• Brian -- BrianDouglasSkinner
• Ducky -- DuckySherwood
• Katie -- KatieCappsParlante

Agenda going in

• game plan for our "lists of possible features"
  • context:
    • We're starting to develop lists of possible features:
    • possible email features
    • possible calendar features
  • questions:
    • What's the best tool for maintaining these lists?
    • Should we be trying to "integrate" various feature lists?
      • the lists on the public wiki
      • spreadsheet versions with unique ids and priority rankings
      • high level summaries with feature clusters and sub-clusters
      • bugzilla entries about work being done related to a feature
      • schedule estimates
    • What the best way to present short summary lists from the long detailed lists?

Summary of we talked about

• Should we be trying to "integrate" various feature lists?
  • Maybe we shouldn't try to integrate the "list of all possible features" and the "priority list of features". Those two could be forked.
  • In the long run, we may need to be careful to avoid creating too many independent lists of features, where each one is conceptually just a different "view" onto the same data.

• What's the best tool for maintaining feature lists?
  • collections of wiki pages?
    • pro: can easy share work with everybody
    • pro: easy for anyone to make additions
    • con: hard to represent new "columns", for things like "priority" and "unique id"
    • con: hard to distill into a high-level summary
  • spreadsheet tables?
    • pro: easy to add new columns, like "priority" and "unique id"
    • pro: more structured than wiki pages
    • pro: easier to provide summary table
    • con: hard to show categories and hierarchies of categories
    • con: can't be shared as easy as wiki pages
  • Microsoft Word Outlines?
    • pro: easy to organize features into a hierarchy
    • con: hard to represent new "columns", for things like "priority" and "unique id"
    • con: can't print high-level summary
  • bugzilla entries?
    • pro: each feature gets it's own url
    • pro: it's a real database
    • pro: if we wanted we could customize it someday to have different "views"
    • con: too cumbersome right now, compared to simple documents
  • Microsoft Project?
    • con: expensive
    • con: only runs on Windows
    • con: hard to share resulting document collaboratively
    • con: annecdotal evidence suggests that people end up spending way too long on it once they start using it
  • Ecco, or Leo, or something else?
    • pros & cons: ???
  • Chandler "feature" items?
    • pro: perfect for just this sort of task!
    • con: not yet available

Game plan coming out

• Ducky
  • continue work on prioritizing the possible e-mail features
  • continue work on figuring out how best to present a summary view of the features, for doing higher level Chandler roadmap planning

• Brian
  • will take a break from working on the list of possible calendar features
  • work on other stuff
    • read up on CAP
    • work on a strawman data model
    • thing about relationship between the schema and the python code
  • return to the list of possible calendar features once Ducky has done more trailblazing about the best ways to organize and summarize and prioritize this sort of work

• Katie
  • in the short-term, do whatever works best (in an ad-hoc way) for keeping notes and discussing calendar feature lists with other people

-- BrianDouglasSkinner - 14 Mar 2003