Time required to write down "wisdom" (Re: "Adult supervision")

[Thomas Narten]

> It seems that the 'process' has some how gotten twisted to disable the
> quick publication of important documents.

This may true if the assumption is that the *process* is what caused
the problems.

>From my perspective, the real issue often tends to be:

1) Good documents don't pop out in the -00 version.

2) Iteration is essential. Iteration means a small number of people
   (e.g., 1-5) read the document, provide good feedback, and then a
   new revision is produced.

3) process is repeated at least a few more times, with a different set
   of reviewers providing the review and feedback each time.

4) Process terminates, because subsequent reviews don't uncover
   significant issues and the reviewers think the document is good
   enough to ship.

You can't rush a document (if you want it to be good). Indeed, when I
write documents, I personally find that if I reread something I wrote
a month earlier, I often find obvious things that need fixing. I often
don't see these if I review the document a few days after last working
on it. The point here is that good documents just don't happen on the
first version and time is needed to properly review and iterate.

Where the "process" sometimes goes wrong is that the sequence of
reviews and iterations haven't happened properly/optimally. Either not
enough iterations, or too long between iterations.

IMO, there is a problem here that bears further examination. Getting
good reviews and then subsequent revisions in a timely fashion is
something I see too much of.

> I think that we, as an organization, do need to do better.

Yep. IMO, we should look hard at ways of ensuring that the needed
iteration on revisions happens in a timely fashion. But not too
timely, as that leads to documents being pushed forward before they
are truly ready.

Thomas