Re: Design Teams (was "v 1.2, IETF material")

Fred Baker <fbaker@acc.com> Sat, 05 December 1992 01:40 UTC

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Date: Fri, 04 Dec 1992 17:41:35 -0800
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From: Fred Baker <fbaker@acc.com>
Message-Id: <9212050141.AA00511@saffron.acc.com>
To: davin@bellcore.com
Subject: Re: Design Teams (was "v 1.2, IETF material")
Cc: poised@CNRI.Reston.VA.US

>> My (speculative) belief is that history may be more kind to
>> the WG chair than it may to the AD (and others) who bear much of the
>> responsibility for (mistakenly) imposing time limits to begin with.
>> History may deal most harshly with those who either seek to impose
>> time limits gratuitously or to abuse them for some advantage.

This bit of wisdom was phrased by the editor of Poor Richard's Almanac as:

	"haste makes waste"

However, don't be too terribly hard on yourself; I have always
considered the estimates as time *targets*, as opposed to time
*limits*, allowing "getting it right" to take precedence over "getting
it on schedule", and yet using the schedule as a club when I needed
to.  "Deliberate Speed", as the term is used in the SNMPV2 development,
is a good thing until it means that the WG will not consider an
approach because of the time limit as opposed to disputing it on
technical grounds.

One attribute of working group charters let out of late is the idea
that we will charter a working group to write a Proposed Standard.  I
feel that the working group should be chartered to write a Full
Standard, and allowed to go dormant for deployment periods along the
way.  To say that anything with any complexity is not expected to
change *at all* between Proposed and Draft (which is what I interpret
the termination of a WG at Proposed Standard to mean) is (ahem!)
optimistic.

Reasonable estimates and reasonable targets are a reasonable thing.
The point is to seek to acheive them without being preoccupied with them.

Fred