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

[Keith Moore]

Good summary.  

The other pitfall I see with this process is that sometimes we keep iterating
on bad documents in the vain hope that they'll get better, and sometimes those
documents get approved due to exhaustion on the part of the reviewers. 
(or worse, in an attempt to avoid embarassment at having invested so much
effort in a bad idea)

But if we could figure out a way to get enough review cycles, at about the
right intervals, and at the same time learn how to prune bad ideas or
incomplete ideas that weren't ready to avoid investing too much in them, we
could drastically improve the quality and relevance of our output.

Keith


> 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.