Noel, guys, > is almost entirely due to container contract changes >made by Avalon. I would like us to be more independent of that treadmill.
+1 > Avalon is in quite a state of upheaval and flux. I hope that something > healthy will emerge, but cannot assume that there won't be contract changes > as it goes forward. As this has been the case for as long as I've been associated with James I would be very wary of basing any James PM decisions on predictions of stability in Avalon. No disrespect to those guys, but they have a different agenda to us. As far as I am concerned our mission is to evolve an increasingly stable and performant product for our users, particularly focusing on James' suitability as a component of larger (or "enterprise") systems (which seems to be a key market), whilst obeying the principle of least surprise, all this requires confidence by the users in our ability which in turn requires predictability and stability in our process and our product. I believe we can (and largely do) achieve this through defect fixes and enhancements to code and architecture. I'm a died in the wool evolutionist as far as James is concerned. As far as Avalon is concerned they are observably revolutionary in their approach, and have different goals than us. James would benefit by adopting many of the changes Avalon makes, but they come at a price. In order to adopt chnage from Avalon we have to seek understanding of the how & the why, perform impact assessments, write and test code, regression test, and load test simply in order to play catch up and with no guarentees that Avalon isn't going to revolutionise, deprecate or simply abandon any of the prerequisites of this work. This effort is not available most times from the James community. Why? because by and large we and our users are satisfied with James' macro performance and our incentives are in getting the details right. As you say Paul's proposal would be bet hedging, I can see (and hope I've articulated) a good justification for doing that, but if we chose to do that would we have the resources and incentive to see it through? Is Paul offering to lead this and perform a significant part of the work? d. *************************************************************************** The information in this e-mail is confidential and for use by the addressee(s) only. If you are not the intended recipient (or responsible for delivery of the message to the intended recipient) please notify us immediately on 0141 306 2050 and delete the message from your computer. You may not copy or forward it or use or disclose its contents to any other person. As Internet communications are capable of data corruption Student Loans Company Limited does not accept any responsibility for changes made to this message after it was sent. For this reason it may be inappropriate to rely on advice or opinions contained in an e-mail without obtaining written confirmation of it. Neither Student Loans Company Limited or the sender accepts any liability or responsibility for viruses as it is your responsibility to scan attachments (if any). Opinions and views expressed in this e-mail are those of the sender and may not reflect the opinions and views of The Student Loans Company Limited. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept for the presence of computer viruses. ************************************************************************** --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
