RFC_2 - Cytoscape Wiki

This is an official Request for Comment (RFC) for "improving the quality of the Cytoscape 2.3 release."

RFC 2 is divided in two parts:

Part I consists of Ethan's interviews with six Cytoscapers (Trey, Gary, Ben, Allan, Aditya, and Rowan). I had hoped to interview more people before the Cytoscape retreat, but unfortunately didn't have time to get to everybody. In Part I, I have done my best to paraphrase people's comments, and I have not indicidated who said what.
Part II consists of ideas which were culled from Ethan's interviews, and are now presented as concrete proposals to the larger group.

This document is under construction.

Part I: The Interviews

We pushed the release date out too much. We should have coordinated our efforts much earlier; we probably could have done something by August. We could have done a much better job if we had coordinated earlier on. I think this compromised the quality of the chosen feature set.
Next time, we need to decide the feature set straight away. Then, do design and implementation in the next 2-3 months, so that we can do a real six month release cycle.
Feature set was based on developer interests, not really based on user's feedback. We need a better mechanism to get more feedback from real users.

I think we chose the right set of features. For example, we chose a set of features that go well together, e.g. the new attribute browse goes well with the CytoPanel API. Plus, the editor fits in. Metanodes could have been in there too, and that would have been nice.
Timeliness could have been better. Quality could have been better.
That said, there are always trade-offs. In the tradeoff between: GraphObjAttributes v. CytoscapeData v. CyAttributes, I think we made the right decision. If we have had put Cytoscape 2.2 out the door a month ago without CyAttributes, it would have been a lot buggier.

I think we picked the right feature set.
Reasonable quality, but could be very much improved.
Smoothness of the user experience and user interace (GUI) is still a real issue.
Reviewed code is pretty high quality.
Release was slow, and could have been faster. We didn't work through all the dependencies between modules early enough.

Under Construction