The problem here appears to be that by requirement, I understand
something that has to be accomplished by the final product, while
other people mean other things. If by requirement we mean something
that we'd like to have but we're willing to drop if we agree that it
would be better to do something else, then I think we can easily agree
on a list of them. But if that's what we mean, I'd appreciate it if
we could use a phrase whose common meaning is closer to what we mean,
e.g., "desirable characteristic".
Requirements definition is found in more than just the waterfall
software development methodology. Are you seriously trying to
suggest that requirements for software development is just a
35-year-old, faded and debunked fad?
Trying to develop fixed requirements in advance of development has
failed over and over and over again execpt in an extremely tightly
constrained environment, which e-mail sure isn't. The processes that
work are more like spirals, going between design, implementation, and
evaluation. But since we're trying to create a standard rather than
write a piece of software, we won't know for quite a while what the
results of future implementation and evaluation are. (I guess that's
why it works better to start with stuff that's been implemented, so we
have at a few turns of the spiral to look at.)
Like I said, there's lots of things that I think we all agree would be
nice to have, but they all conflict with each other to various degrees
and have various costs to implement. It's not useful to discuss them
out of the context of implementation and deployment.
[ signature must survive forwarding, mailing lists, etc. ]
This is exactly the kind of war by proxy that I was referring to.
You are the one that said this was an obvious but debatable
requirement. I'm not sure how it can be both,
It's not a "requirement", it's one of many desirable characteristics
that conflicts with other desirable characteristics. It's obvious
that it would be nice to have. It's not obvious that it would be so
nice to have that we can insist a priori that it's a requirement.
As I've said before, I think that Dave's proposed charter is specific
enough, and we should start looking at the merits and weaknesses of
the proposals.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
http://www.taugh.com