What confuses me is how the calendar feature was deemed a priority over so many other features. I turned it on to see it, and after a day turned it off. It's just not useful.
Keep in mind, we don't know what Software Development Life Cycle Tesla is using. It would not surprise me if they, as a young tech company, were using some flavor of Agile over waterfall.
Most people think of things in a "waterfall" style. This feature was done because it was at the top of a list, or next in line of a long list of projects wanted. And because this was worked on, something else wasn't being worked on. Because that is how SDLC worked everywhere for a very long time.
This is all
assumption based on my personal experiences, but it can show how a "lower priority" item often ends up getting out ahead of "more important" items:
More likely, if they're working from an Agile backlog, they're assuming they have a set velocity of what they can accomplish. Let's say that velocity is
X.
The team starts by pulling in their most critical tasks to define the scope of what they want to work on. Using their best estimates, they keep adding things until someone says "Ok, we are
Y units of velocity short of our estimated capacity
X, what on our backlog is
Y sized?"
Maybe media system overhaul was
Y+20 sized and including it would mean major delays to 6.0 or maybe it was the same size as Calendar but they thought it was less important, in the end the agile team agreed that Calendar was
Y sized and it got in on the timeline they were hoping to hit for 6.0
Maybe media overhaul is in a parallel team. Maybe they had some devs who had a more experience with calendar sync tools than media and they decided to tackle the "smaller" item first.
Again, I cannot tell you what the precise methodology or thinking in the software teams is, but the moral is you cannot assume that just because something came first, it was "deemed a priority".
