Some cases of poor quality

Eric Rosen erosen at cisco.com
Wed Mar 5 13:20:34 CET 2003


I see from the discussion on this  list that there is concern about the poor
quality  of many  documents.  I  haven't seen  much mention  of some  of the
things which I regard as the root causes of the poor quality: 

- The authors have no idea how to write a good quality specification. 

- The authors  do not  want to write  a good quality  specification, because
  that would be providing knowledge to people who aren't paying for it.  (Or
  perhaps  the authors  just don't  care; after  all, improving  the quality
  doesn't really help them any, it just takes more of their time.)

- There  are too many  authors, and  each wants  to write  something ("let's
  agree on the outline, and then we'll assign a section to each of us"). 

- To  obtain consensus,  too many  compromises and  combinations  of options
  needed to be added.  This tends to happen (in my experience) when a lot of
  the folks who are active in the WG don't know what they are talking about;
  to obtain  consensus, the folks  who do know  what they are  talking about
  need to placate the others somehow. 

  (The  root cause  of this  root cause  is that  the notion  of "consensus"
  doesn't make much  sense unless it means "consensus  among people who know
  what they  are talking about",  but WG chairs  don't usually want  to rule
  that not every opinion is well-informed.  In fact, it is not clear whether
  this is even allowed by process.)

- The authors are overly pig-headed  early in the process, not understanding
  that  the  further  along you  get,  the  harder  it  is to  ignore  valid
  objections;  further, the  WG  chair fails  to  make this  clear to  them.
  People with  no experience bringing a  draft to PS may  have an especially
  difficult time with this. The result  is that valid objections pile up and
  must be dealt with late in the process.

- The authors  don't care about  getting their draft  to PS; they  care only
  about making  it a WG draft,  or about getting it  to RFC in  some form or
  other,  because this is  all that  their employers'  marketing departments
  require. 

- The  authors  are  entirely focused  on  their  own  little slice  of  the
  technology, and  don't care at all  how their work relates  to other work,
  even in the same WG. 

  This particular reason  seems to be the  one that gets a lot  of focus.  I
  would add that attempting to  micromanage the WG by carefully constructing
  its charter  is not a very effective  method of dealing with  this.  I see
  this happening mostly within individual  WGs.  Some authors even regard it
  as a positive that they are ignoring everything else, otherwise they would
  have  to  "introduce  dependencies",  thereby  further  slowing  down  the
  process. 

Now, to look at the other  side of the coin, sometimes documents are branded
as 'poor quality' by the "old boys' network" for reasons that have little to
do with technical quality:

- The  document specifies a  solution which  presupposes that  IP networking
  service  is  not  necessarily  a  commodity.   This  will  lead  to  vague
  assertions that the document "doesn't  scale to the Internet" or "violates
  the end-to-end  principle", followed by  a discussion which appears  to be
  entirely religious or agenda-based, rather than technical. 

  Once  something like  this happens,  the authors  and  (prospective future
  authors) may  conclude that what is  important to advancing  a document is
  not its  technical quality, but  what their agenda  is, or perhaps  in how
  well they succeed in hiding their agenda.    

- The document addresses an area which, in the opinion of some AD, is not in
  accord with the  IETF's mission.  Since one of the  problems is that there
  is no  common understanding of  the IETF's mission,  this is not  really a
  quality problem and it is difficult to make progress once this happens. 

- The document specifies a solution which  is not the solution which some AD
  would  have  preferred.   This  may  be exacerbated  if  the  AD-preferred
  solution is not of interest to the WG.  ADs sometimes try to avoid this by
  adding their preferred solutions to  the WG charter, which leads of course
  to later claims that the WG is not following its charter.

- The document specifies a solution involving technology that is outside the
  AD's  area of  expertise.   This must  be  poor quality  solution, on  the
  grounds that "if I don't understand it, it can't be important".









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