So I was reading an article about a talk the Subversion authors gave and one of the things that stood out was the importance of having a mission statement to guide development and keep focus.

This is actually very relevant to me right now with Tcpreplay. As the project has become more mature and stable, I’ve started thinking about what to do next. But so far, I haven’t really thought about the “big picture”. Up until now, development has been very iterative: identify a new feature, develop, release, fix any bugs… wash, rinse, repeat. There really hasn’t been much vision, other then perhaps “Develop tools for using pcap captures to test inline security devices like firewalls and IPS’s”. Honestly, this was interesting to me back in 2002, but now that I’ve left the IPS vendor world it’s not that interesting and I’m pretty much out of touch/disenfranchised with the whole IPS thing.

The result is that I very rarely use Tcpreplay myself. On the other-hand, writing Tcpreplay has taught me a lot about software development and developing in C.

So what’s next then?

I’ve been trying to come up with what should be Tcpreplay’s “mission statement”, but honestly, I find myself not sufficiently motivated to see any of these grand ideas to completion. The result is I’m seriously thinking of putting Tcpreplay on the shelf for a few months (after 3.3.2) and either work on other projects like Cabernet which I actually use on a regular basis or start something new.