launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Julian Edwards
<julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tuesday 14 September 2010 15:42:56 Jonathan Lange wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 3:35 PM, Julian Edwards
>>
>> <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > On Tuesday 14 September 2010 13:46:01 Curtis Hovey wrote:
>> >> Staging restore times trend up, so we are always talking about
>> >> increasing time for a rollout.
>>
>> ...
>>
>> > I'd really like it if we could clean up after ourselves in the DB!
>> >  Should this be a check point on the LEP template?
>>
>> LEPs seem to work best when they are oriented towards user needs and
>> speak in terms of user-visible changes. I think we should keep
>> implementation details off the form.
>>
>> Perhaps https://dev.launchpad.net/ArchitectureGuide?
>>
>> jml
>
>
> Clearing up old data is at the very least partly user visible isn't it?  I'm
> not saying ArchitectureGuide is bad place; I think it's good, but I also think
> that developers should be thinking about this stuff at the LEP stage too.
>

It is, but when thinking about user experience it's perhaps best to
think in different terms: making it easy to find what you want,
eliminating clutter, how to find old <thing>s (and for what purpose),
what happens when the activity is completed – that sort of thing. They
all _could_ be related to clearing up old data, but they aren't
necessarily so.

If we added items like those to the LEP process, then I'd want to add
more: how do people find the thing in question, how do they know they
want to use it, what steps are taken to make sure people feel safe
when they try it, how do they recover from failures, and something I'm
having trouble articulating along the lines of "think about the whole
user experience from before the start to after the finish".

I agree that we should be thinking about this before we start coding.
But I don't want to add those to the LEP process because I believe the
list would grow without bound, soon become very stale and end up not
actually improving user experience.

jml