+++ James Westby [2011-05-24 14:55 -0400]:
In addition, I'm wary of adding lots of extra features to workitems, as I feel they tend to be symptomatic of trying to load up engineers with too much process. We should always be careful to balance the desire for more information with the overhead that it causes.
Very true.
I don't like blueprints either. Indeed I find them approximately useless and just another annoying thing one has to update from time to time along with weekly reports, etc. So far as I can tell they aren't for engineers - they are for managers to track progress, so from that point of view the current system does at least have the benefit of simplicity.
Making them more complicated _might_ make them more useful (which would encourage updating if engineers found them useful for day-to-day work), but more likely it'd just make them more tiresome to update, but still essentially uninteresting.
I'm afraid I don't know what the 'right' answer is, but I'm not convinced that 'more emphasis on, and process encoded in, blueprints' is it.
Wookey