Let a QA department into the works

["Andreas Röhler" <andreas.roehler@online.de>]

From Re: Why Emacs needs a modern bug tracker

Am Samstag, 5. Januar 2008 00:25 schrieb Alan Mackenzie:
> Hi, Eric!
>
> On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 11:44:54AM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>
> [ .... ]
>
  Let a QA department into the works, and before
> you know it you've got upwards of 100 largely meaningless fields, so that
> said QA "can accurately monitor the trends and problems of the developers
> and tune the company's processes accordingly".
>



AFAIU the way Emacs is developed is still very the same
RMS described the start at MIT: programmers join the
code they use and like.

There is nothing wrong with that, as we have and enjoy
Emacs finally.

However, as far as the world of non-programmers is
touched, some short-comings are obvious:

Entering Emacs from a common
writers/translaters/publishers life, it took me hours
if not days of desperate searching to realize:
text-mode has no foot-note facilities integrated.

Having heard from Emacs as an editor with capabilities I
simply couldn't imagine that, searched the doku over
and over. (Please don't forget, while starting, you'll
make a lot of stupid errors too, being aware of
that. So people will not adress help groups in this
state of affair, rather abondon the tool.)

Footnotes here is simply an expample, I could list a
couple of more things.

Well, you could decide: let Emacs stay a born of joy
for programmers and programmers only. Than distributors
should tell that more clearly than its done now.

Or it's said: We will have Emacs as a general editing
tool. Than the needs of none-programmers should be
studied in a systematic manner.

To understand the needs of people of a different kind
is a difficult task, as psychologists or ethnography
may explain. It's a hard task as programming
itself. Probably the help of experts for this will be
required.

From there the need for such an expert heading a QA
group, with some authority to make decisions how to
proceed.

Grüße

Andreas Röhler