Dan Kegel wrote:
http://yokozar.org/blog/archives/48 is a fun little look at using simulation to see how various strategies might affect Wine development. The one that worked out best was to pick some random user who's almost happy, fix the last few bugs that are keeping his apps from working, and then once he's happy, move on to the next such user.
- Dan
Thank you Dan, you reminded me to forward my blog post to the list ;)
Coincidentally, I found an essay by Paul Graham where he says a very similar thing: http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
-- Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.
Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can't expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It's easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it's harder to lie to yourself. If you think you're 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it's not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it's easy to know how many users you have. --
There's a lot to learn from the model I made, and it's an easy to modify python script that you can just run in the background while doing real work. For instance, you can test a strategy that tries to maximize collateral damage (working on bugs that affect the most apps) against a strategy that tries to maximize the effect of specific damage (working on almost working apps). It turns out the collateral damage strategy isn't very good - you fix a few bugs in a lot of apps, but most will remain broken due to some small problem that hardly affects anything else.
Thanks, Scott Ritchie