Re: [Libreoffice] [libreoffice-design] General relationship between coders and designers (was: [PUSHED]fdo#31251...)

Hi Sébastien, all!

Wow, I really admire your calm ... although you might feel like trapped
between the lines ;-) I'd like to use your mail to address some points
that might help in general.


Am Mittwoch, den 09.03.2011, 23:04 +0100 schrieb Sébastien Le Ray:
> Le Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:11:19 +0100,
> Bernhard Dippold <bernhard@familie-dippold.at> a écrit :

[...]

> I strongly believe that LO have to take into account user feedback about
> usability and design, so I'm pleased to have discussion with design
> people. Interaction is a good thing.

Cool! :-)

[...]

> Here this is my fault, I didn't knew that the design team had a mailing
> list (which seem to take 8 hours to deliver mails into my inbox), if I
> had, I would have posted the screenshot here to get more feedback. I
> apologize for that and didn't thought it would go that far.

I think the "fault" is the youth of the project. The developers invested
a lot to set up proven infrastructure and processes, even before we went
public with the idea of LibreOffice - development could start
immediately. And one of the initial ideas was to get to the code without
being "hindered" (a.k.a small changes, refactoring, ...).

This was a bit different for Design, where we started working on getting
a real team before touching the processes - together. Thus, you couldn't
easily know about "us" - currently my hope is that more settled
developers will guide you towards the contact persons required for your
task (whether this will be documentation, QA, or design etc.)

You may remember my question on the dev list whether it might help to
have some hints how to request (and why to request) help by the Design
team ... something which might also be helpful if part of some "Get
Started" for developers, I assume.

[...]
> > But such a specification is necessarily a result of some kind of 
> > discussion, if there is no single decision maker. As we don't want
> > such single person decisions, this list is "talkative".
>
> I perfectly understand and agree with that. That's why I made the
> second patch (which gave me headache), I wanted that people who *know*
> about design could test their feeling on real use cases rather than
> trying to get something out of Gimp/Photoshop. [...]

As I said, that's outstanding - and it's also a new experience for us
within LibreOffice that somebody offers this to us. As I said in another
mail, at OOo, I usually used the buildbots that also required an
available CWS.


[...]
> > Perhaps we need a different way to interact with developers, keeping 
> > them out of our processes and coming back to them with the results.
> > This could be the relevant bug-report, a mail on the developer list
> > or any other structure.
>
> I disagree. I think having a developer may help design guys to have
> steps into their work. A developer can tell rather quickly "wow! the
> way your approaching this would involve major refactoring of code, I
> think investigating on this other way would have more chances to be
> implemented quickly and easily". Having steps in evolution allow to
> bring them more quickly to end users, thus allow to get more feedback
> and correct if needed.

I also feel this way ... the best results created so far were always
based on interaction between development and design. I'm sure Bernhard
shares this view ... to me, he rather addresses the importance that
parties taking part should be respectful to each other. And you
Sébastien, seem to be a perfect example that this does work well :-)


[...]
> > >   Thanks for your patience Sebastien, I'd just recommend
> > > moving onto something else at speed ;-)
> >
> > ... I will not be the one to drive any decisions in the Design Team
> > at the moment.
>
> I regret that. The two people who decided to give up had good arguments
> and it all seem to be a misunderstanding.
> I'm a new developer on libreoffice so maybe Michael feared that I leave
> if design team emitted objections on my patches. That's not the case.
[...]

Thank you!

Okay, a kindly meant question to everyone - to me, it appears to be a
problem with regard to the communication with and understanding of the
others people's work. (Also for experienced developers, it seems. *g*)

Of course, we should continue to clarify our roles and how to
interact ... on the other hand, would it be helpful to continue to
improve LibreOffice to learn how to benefit from each other?

Cheers,
Christoph


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