[Building Sakai] Symphony - Stability over Features

[Charles Severance]

I really liked this blog post about the long-term view of Symphony.  Of course since it is ORM middleware and not UI code - the lessons here apply more to our Kernel, APIs, web services, and integration points than to the precise look and feel.

http://fabien.potencier.org/article/68/about-symfony-stability-over-features

Excerpt:

To start easy, let's see what stabilization means for me:

	• Refactor less: We need to stop doing refactoring code for the sake of it. Sometimes, our code is not the best architected one, sometimes we could simplify some code, or make it easier to read, but if it does not make things easier for our users, we should avoid doing refactoring.

	• Fix more bugs and edge cases: Symfony has twenty-plus components, small and large, and we are commited to maintain them in the long term. And working on fixing bugs that people encounter or fixing edge cases is a must. Most developers prefer to work on new features rather than fixing bugs, but personnally, I do like fixing bugs because most of time fixing a bug is a challenge... and we like challenges, right?

	• Write more tests: Symfony2 has many unit tests but we need more. We need to write tests that cover bugs and edge cases that we fix, but some parts of the framework are not well tested enough.

	• Write more documentation: Thanks to a great doc team, Symfony2 documentation is really good and it is updated and improved every single day. We should continue this work and the more people helping, the better. The good news is that everyone is able to contribute here.

	• Stop breaking backward compatibility: This is the most important topic and I know that many core contributors are nervous about this one. When we break backward compatibility, we are breaking the Symfony2 ecosystem at large. So, except when fixing a security issue, we must not break backward compatibility anymore after Symfony 2.3 and until Symfony 3.0.

-- Chuck
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