Microsoft suspends dev accounts for high-profile open source projects

Apparently nobody at Microsoft considered that blocking critical software hurts Microsoft more than the open source developers being blocked.

Microsoft response at the end of that article.

It doesn't sound like suspention, because they would be able to fill out the form and get unsuspended. This is closer to account termination.

Nothing else works for prioritisation, any other categorising into "High/Medium/Low" just fails.

By doing so you end up with the nonsense we had at a company I once worked for, where stories were all put in medium.

This was because stories in low were simply never actioned, they'd never ever get done, everyone came to implicitly understand this. It was still a useful dumping ground for the kinds of stories you know you ought to do, but no-one wanted to do, but it was useful to have noted on record. But for prioritising actual work, it was useless.

Stories in High had a special process defined in a handbook that no-one wanted the hassle of dealing with.

So everything was Medium.

This had obvious problems, and it grew larger than could be managed.

So "Just Above Medium" was born, for stories that were higher priority than your everyday stories in Medium.

This in time grew too, so "Just Above Just Above Medium" (aka JAJAM) was born.

By the time I started, there was even a "JAJAM+" category, for stories that had to be fast-tracked through the process too.

The whole thing essentially fell back to having the product/development leads come to an understanding of what work needed to be done. Which is the right way to do it, but that should simply be made more explicit and part of the process by simply having all stories ranked.

Then you don't need the mental overhead of trying to decide in a design meeting if something is "Just above Medium" or just above that...