The notion that, without exploration into multiple directions, a piece of software becomes staid (and developers get bored), but without periodically stepping back and pruning those multiple directions that same piece of software becomes unruly.

This is a principle I use when writing software, and is a standard idea from academic texts about what makes innovation sustainable. It is driving my concerns about the duplicated work on FreeSkin / SeeSkin, on MailNotificationEnhanced / NotificationPlugin

It also has a nice parallel to WabiSabi.

In short: I believe that we need to do more pruning.

Consolidation is important because we don't have an ever larger team and I see no effort being focussed on getting one. (Indeed, we are still collectively denying that half of the core team left a long time ago). Trying to support all offshoots of development this project without adding the capacity to not just write but also to support ongoing changes saps the lifeblood of the project: we get tired of writing non-core code, we don't have the energy to do it properly, it extends expectations of what the code should do and it all comes and bites us later in the form of later and later releases.

-- MartinCleaver - 08 May 2004

Searched: Consolidate

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See also http://changingminds.org/explanations/decision/divergence_convergence.htm

-- MartinCleaver - 26 Mar 2005

It always saddens me when we do exploration when the concepts are stable enough that we should be doing consolidation. Without ExplorationThenConsolidation there is not requisite variety to keep innovating or not sufficient sanity to keep the community efforts from disapating chasing all the offshoots.

-- MartinCleaver - 20 Apr 2006