But you use them to justify your decisions anyway by generalizing that small sample's response and applying it to the whole user base. RFC's should not be used as opinion polls or general surveys, they should be used to initiate and drive technical discussion of a development change proposal and they should be based on a pre-designed template that requires initiators to base them on sound technical reasons (facts) rather than subjective opinions. Each RFC should include from the submitter:naderman wrote:RFCs are not meant to be used to collect data on the opinions of all phpBB users.
Proposal detail
Pros - using data to support why the proposal should be implemented
Cons - due diligence to identify the potential negative consequences of the proposal
Scope -Impact, what and who would be impacted by the proposal again supported by quantifiable data
Statistics cannot answer everything but it is more reliable to base decisions on actual data than subjective opinions.naderman wrote:Statistical data can be helpful, but often it leaves questions unanswered.
That is what is so upsetting to me personally, you do not have to live with it, you are choosing to. You have so much untapped data available to you that you refuse to avail yourselves of, instead you choose to rely on subjectivity to drive the development process. Any one of you could have found the same data that nn- and I did, all you had to do was look. But you didn't. I really believe it never occurred to anyone to try and assess the impact which infers you did not think there was any/it was negligible, or that you didn't care what the impact was.naderman wrote:We should think about what the consequences of our decisions are for all those people who do not participate in this process but in the end decisions here are made based on subjective reasoning and the interests of whoever is here to raise their opinion. This process is flawed but we will have to live with that.
I will again try to drive home the most egregious error in any software development project that I have ever witnessed (by quoting myself):
me wrote:The reason that this decision was not sound is because you based the decision on boards that would not be affected by the proposal instead of boards that would be. You gave the voice that should have the least weight in such a decision the most power. You need to use the other data points to assess the true impact of the decision,
Analogy: You posed a question regarding the continued existence of product A (SS) to an available group of people (available at that time and not a representative group of people) and the majority of responses were "drop it" however the majority of these respondents also admitted to not using product A themselves (for various subjective reasons) thus widely skewing the perceived impact as negligible. If you want assess the impact of anything you have to start by querying the people who would be impacted. It is safe to infer that anyone who does not like or use SS today would not object to it's removal in the first place.