Having an extra feature never hurts, rebutted
·2 mins
On the Launchpad user list, we’re having a bit of a chat about whether or not to remove team polls. One commenter suggested that “having an extra feature never hurts”. Curtis’s reply is so good I want to quote it here in full:
Actually, It always hurts. It is always bad: 1. The bad UI experience reflects poorly on all Launchpad. 2. A user tried to mess with URLs to avoid the UI and caused an oops. I spent a couple days fixing an issue that I personally do not think should ever have been a priority. Certainly there are at least a 1000 more important bugs than the oops, but we believe oopses are always high priority. 3. Pages are slower to load because the application looks for poll data. 4. We must update the code as libraries and infrastructure changes. 5. We need to triage and retriage all the poll bugs. 6. We need to answer user questions on Lp Answers and IRC.It is better that Launchpad provides 5 really great features than toprovide 10 mediocre features. I prefer to remove the feature, but if thecommunity believes that it is important, we might work on this in theupcoming Launchpad bugjam to close as many bugs as possible in a week. Icannot foresee this feature being compelling in the net two yearswithout a contributor dedicating time to it.The situation is eloquently stated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
That is all.