Design Process : Lumiera Design Process
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[grid="all"]
`------------`-----------------------
*State*         _Final_
*Date*          _2007-06-03_
*Proposed by*   link:ct[]
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Define a Lumiera design process
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Set up a lightweight formalized process how people can add proposals for the
Lumiera development.

Description
~~~~~~~~~~~
Just use this Wiki to make it easy to add proposals in a well defined manner.

I'd like to introduce a slightly formalized process for the ongoing Lumiera
planning:
 * Every proposal is instantiated as 'Idea', the author gives other people the
   opportunity to review and comment on it with extreme prejudice, while still
   working out details.
 * When the the 'Idea' in a proper form and worked out in most details it
   becomes a 'Draft'. This 'Draft' need to be carefully reviewed, commented,
   perhaps corrected and rated by the other Developers.
 * At some point we may decide that a 'Draft' becomes a 'Final' (I leave it
   open how this decision shall be done for now). 'Final' Documents will be
   imported into repository.
 * Sometimes proposals will become dropped for some reason, this is indicated
   by changing their state to 'Dropped', they still stay in the system for
   further reference.


Tasks
~~~~~
 * We need to refine link:Lumiera/DesignProcessTemplate[].

Pros
~~~~

 * Simple
 * Flexible
 * No much rules
 * Persistent and at Final stage well documented process


Cons
~~~~
 * Could be abused/vandalized (but wiki can use ACL's)
 * Depends on my server, this might be unfavorable or unreliable, ymmv.
 * Will only work if all or almost all involved people agree on this process


Alternatives
~~~~~~~~~~~~

 * We could use some forum, Trac, Mailinglist or whatever instead.
 * Just for Design documentation 0I would give http://bouml.free.fr/[Bouml] a
   try. For myself, I am not very fond of UML Design tools, while Bouml looks
   quite promising and we could maintain the UML model in git repositories
   which would be more favorable than this centralized wiki. The backside is
   that this needs even more agreement between the developers, everyone has to
   install and use bouml (and learn its usage) and design is constrained by a
   external tool.


Rationale
~~~~~~~~~
Wiki works it is simple to use and just flexible enough to handle the task. I
don't go to install any other software for such tasks on my server. While the
design progresses I'd propose to move our work into git repositories and
eventually phase this wiki pages out anyways. I'd rather like to start out
distributed/git right away .. but git gives us only a fine storage layer, for a
design process we need some good presentation layer (later when using git and
starting the implementation everyones favorite editor serves for that) I have
no better ideas yet to solve the presentation problem other than using this
wiki (or maybe bouml).

Comments
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Back to link:/documentation/devel/rfc.html[Lumiera Design Process overview]