Tesla’s Software/User Interface Priorities In Light of Recent Developments

[ecarfan]

Neither of us know how many software engineers Tesla employs. We can agree to disagree on how Tesla should prioritize development and new feature releases, that's all.

 

[AmpedRealtor]

Everything is coming... soon!

 

[JohnQ]

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".

Funny, I just had this conversation yesterday regarding feature enhancements for an integration between two HR systems (yes, boring I know). Priority 3 was simple to implement and could be slipped into the current release, priority 1 was complex so got deferred. Funny how the real world works

 

[bollar]

There are lots of features that I would have liked to have seen before Calendar, but I have to say that I do use it multiple times a day and think it's a great addition. Now, if Navigation was close to as good as Waze, and if the Navigation Maps were less than two-to-three years old, I'd say it could be a killer feature.

 

[AmpedRealtor]

Ditto on calendar. I questioned the feature endlessly until I actually used it. Now I love it!

I forgot that I'm a realtor with appointments... most already in my calendar. What a time saver.

 

[iadbound]

One of the execs gave a presentation a few months ago, and he mentioned that the UI group is very small. Of course, there are probably many other software engineers as well.

 

[AmpedRealtor]

Yes, I saw that presentation as well. Javier Verdura, I think. Five people in the Tesla UI team. But that is UI. I'm sure there are many, many more who are software engineers.

 

[morbot]

Funny, I just had this conversation yesterday regarding feature enhancements for an integration between two HR systems (yes, boring I know). Priority 3 was simple to implement and could be slipped into the current release, priority 1 was complex so got deferred. Funny how the real world works

Looking back I figured I probably included way too much information... but I guess I'm just still too passionate about what I'm doing