Product development

Back again after much travel and recommitting to blogging regularly!

One of the challenges of openBC that I am in charge of now is product development and here we have some very interesting issues.

We have an enormous list of new features that we are working on many of which are  based on requests  from users and  many that we have researched and some that we think are just plain cool.

Now over the weekend we had an example of where we responded to impetus from many users and from our team as a preparation for a really big set of new features.

We renamed Forums to Groups something that we though was a minor change and that we needed to do in order to prepare the way for a host of new features to improve the existing system of forums.

We also checked to see that the industry standard in naming is groups. We also tried to send out a warning mail to our moderators.

And it all went, as the English say, pear shaped. Meaning that this small change caused a lot of unhappiness primarily I suspect because we did not communicate well why we are doing it and we did not involve people as fully as we should.

Mea Culpa

So how do we fix this in the future?

Well one thing I know is that the front line of user communication is our support team (and to some lesser degree this blog).  So from now on our support team leader Maren is going to have final approval on the release of new features and changes to the site, with the exception of fixes that affect site up-time and database performance. (Lars is now mourning his ability to ask for new things to be done right away. )

One thing that will not change is our pace of development as we want to deliver more and more new functionality while at the same time seamlessly integrating that functionality wherever possible.

There is a constant battle though for development time and till now my focus has been to improve the throughput of our development team by removing distractions such as their having to many requests for tasks from the various divisions of the company.

Having focused on that for the past two months I am now going to work on making the delivery of new features more comfortable for everyone with both users involvement and also the creation of help text for new features ahead of the release date.

In a nut shell the  ongoing challenge is to balance our development resources with our impetus to improve the platform while getting our users more involved in the process.

So I also intend to use this blog to get feedback on new features and on features people would like to see.

So I guess at the risk of being inundated your suggestions are welcome and please bear in mind that we cannot respond everything people suggest we do. (especially some of the more colorful suggestions we received in the complaints box over the weekend those I am not going to try )

Bill