[Dextrose] [Sugar-devel] [PATCH v3] Reduction in the time taken for loading of the menu (SL#1169)

[Bernie Innocenti]

[cc += fgrose,m_stone]

On Wed, 2010-10-27 at 06:19 +0100, Martin Dengler wrote: 
> On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 06:05:58AM +0530, Manusheel Gupta wrote:
> > Are we ready to commit this patch?
> 
> Well, it's only a year after there were some quite significant
> discussions about it:
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-October/020141.html
> 
> There were many concerns.  Have they all been addressed?  Perhaps just
> nobody can be bothered to object again?

Well, a big change since last year is that now we've actually tested
this UI change for several months with a large number of real users.
The last adjustments proposed by Frederick Grose weren't actually
tested in a classroom, but it was well justified and lays somewhere
between the old and the new timings.

In order to test this change, we had to actually apply the patch to a
release build before we knew whether or not it was an improvement.
There's no other way! Very few developers have this luxury, so the
requirement to test each UI change beforehand should be dropped unless
we want to halt development.

For the future, I'd like to propose that we review UI changes using the
same criteria of any other code change. That is, by applying the
maintainer's best judgment upfront and testing the best we can
afterwards.

Establishing a tighter feedback loop with users is a problem that can be
solved separately with the help of deployments.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/