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

Brian E Carpenter brian at hursley.ibm.com
Tue May 13 10:32:06 CEST 2003


john.loughney at nokia.com wrote:
> 
> Thomas,
> 
> One follow-up:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Well, sometimes good may even be too much, if it results in a document
> coming out much later than the market needs.  'Good Enough' is, quite
> often, sufficient.  Part of the IETF work is to make protocols that
> interoperate.  If needed protocols are not done when needed, then
> there is no interoperation.  Talking to some former-IETFers, one
> of the main reasons for not bringing new protocol work to the IETF
> is that it takes too long to get the work done.  To me, good enough
> is better than none at all.  I think in most cases, this is probably
> enough.

John,

Our industry is maturing, I think. Our notions of "good enough" and "too
slow" may need to change. Note, I'm not disagreeing that we need better
processes - but let's recognise that the world is changing.

  Brian



More information about the Problem-statement mailing list