Re: Wonky Monaco 9
Re: Wonky Monaco 9
- Subject: Re: Wonky Monaco 9
- From: Jeffrey Oleander <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 09:07:03 -0700 (PDT)
> Steve Mills <email@hidden> wrote:
>> On 2006 Oct 3, at 08:43:53, Alexander von Below wrote:
>> You have a point, but as we both probably worked in the
>> professional software industry, you know that a posting
>> on a mailing lists means nothing to managers.
> It depends on the list and the manager. I frequent a
> mailing list for our product that was started by one
> of our customers. Our customers get direct feedback
> from me, an actual developer who makes design
> decisions. They love it, and so do I...
We've done that in companies where I worked. One firm
didn't have formal product line management, QA and beta
testing programs, or conduct focus groups, but the CEO and
the tech support folks, marketing and software engineering
all kept an eye on the discussion groups and used it to
help guide plans for new features, bug fixes, etc.
Another firm had more formal processes, separate tech
support, tech writers, performance testing, product
evaluation (QA) and product line management. We made it
easy to file bug reports and kept a separate set of records
for the post-release bugs and feature requests, from the
internal and pre-release (i.e. beta test) bugs and feature
requests. Before a release, we'd fly in representatives of
our top 10, 20 or more customers from around the world to
hack away in our own labs, talk with developers and
documentation writers, etc. And, of course, the sales and
marketing folks would also lean heavily to get things
they'd promised to customers with or without checking with
product line management and development first.
A lot of things fall through the cracks or get
inappropriate priorities when the process is too informal,
but the system gets too clogged up in bureaucracy when it's
too formal. One of the important innovations I helped push
was to get development from altering the priorities, but to
keep both each customer's priority for a feature or bug,
and let development assign their own priority. Before
that, some of the developers, not having a good idea of how
to fix something, would unlilaterally down-grade its
priority. For a while there, we had a couple low-level dev
managers who were closing the tickets as "known bug", FCOL,
as though knowing about it meant it should be ignored. We
didn't quite get to having both a severity and urgency,
though; it was too big of a step to gain acceptance at the
lower levels, or upper-management backing.
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