Subject: RE: [Sipping] Re: [Sip] Thoughts on the Principle of DividingandConquering

From: "Jean-Francois Mule" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2006 18:08:32 -0700

There's been a great deal of good questions and great ideas exchanged on
this thread. Folks seem to have various opinions on what the facets of
the problem are, what the metrics are to evaluate improvement, who the
stakeholders are, and who should benefit from those improvements.

Below are some personal thoughts reading the current thread and
re-hashing it in the light of the above questions.

--- problem statement
It would be a plus to better characterize the problem.
 - is it about increasing the quantity of the work output?
   getting more RFCs out in a calendar year - Henning & everyone

 - is it about the quality of work output?
do we have a bottleneck because we always have to have so and so agree
on the directions of the ID? If this is true, let's build a formal
directorate as was proposed: I believe it de-facto exists today in
sip/sipping and is required given the complexity of some work items.
Should working code suffice at the risk of coming back to some RFCs
(Henry) and classifying some work as experimental at first, historical
later on?  

 - is it about raising the perceived level of satisfaction of some SDOs?

Forking out non-generic usage or lowering the bar for p-headers: does
this really help SIP? Who are those SDOs and do their liaison reps have
any opinion? Dean et al.

 - is it about the pace of high priority I-Ds?
suggested by a few: if only we were certain that the 5 published SIPPING
RFC in 2005 at the top priority ones... The meaning of priority here is
interesting- we won't get consensus on that... today, it seems set by
the defacto directorate

 - is it just about wg chair management overload on administrative
tasks?
btw - my sincere recognition for the load the wg chairs and many of the
directorate members collectively carry.

 - could it be a typical project mgmt pb?
Never ending expanding scope, lack of resources: be it directorate
members, project champions or just stakeholders to get the work done,
and no real schedule: ID authors provide their own milestones and
deadlines, the wg comments change the focus of an ID, the more it lasts
the more authors have difficulties getting back to it and folks just can
be held to the deadlines?

I think some areas in SIPPING exhibit different problems and some
compromise have to be made to meet some improvement goals. Doctor
Willis, the diagnosed dialysis seems to exhibit multiple symptoms.

--- some thoughts
I like the suggestions Dean, Henning and many others have put forward to
solve pieces of the problem. I think some should be tried in parallel as
some areas of SIPPING and after say 9 months, do a status check:
	- add one new wg charter for a very short period of time with
well-known "high" priority IDs and strict milestones. And as Mike
proposed, define conditions for terminating the wg in case of failures.
	- formalize the directorate and have a process by which clear
directions come out of it on specific IDs in between meetings.
	- name a few folks willing to be project champions and try out
Mike's ID finish marathon proposal (sipping-config could be one of them)
but please, empower them to recommend conclusion of the work item - "we
are done on this, this is good enough - let's ship it".

A body that puts itself in question like the IETF is doing (proto, etc.,
or Brian C's recent critique of RFC2026) or this thread in sip/sipping
is half way to solving the pb. What is the problem?

Jean-Francois.

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