Use a real feature request tool !

[Bokan]

To the affinity team :

The community around your products is really involved and understanding. It's a pitty we don't even have a proper tool to request features.

 

Where do you get user stories from ? How do you sort them ? Looks like posting in this forum is like yelling in the void.

 

As a first step simple vote plugin on this part of the forum would allow us to +1 the threads proposing the features we like. Then you just have to estimate the amount of work required for each and start by easiest, most requested features.

 

Hope this post will be heard.

[Pšenda]

 

[Hokusai]

Bokan,

 

Instead of creating a new thread for this, why not post again in the original thread you created last year? Here is the link and as well some insightful comments from the developers. 

 

[Bokan]

Hokusai : because I simply forgot I wrote the previous thread !

I had no notification about it and not even saw any of the answers. Thank you for pointing it out.

 

It is sure that It's not the customer deciding what should be done. But any company must listen to its customers. Not giving a proper tool just mean : " ok I took your money, now I don't give a **** about your feedback" that's not a good behaviour.

 

There are so many so simple missing things...

 

[Mark Ingram]

1 hour ago, Bokan said:

It is sure that It's not the customer deciding what should be done. But any company must listen to its customers. Not giving a proper tool just mean : " ok I took your money, now I don't give a **** about your feedback" that's not a good behaviour.

 

There are so many so simple missing things...

 

 

We do read all the forums, including feature requests...

[Patrick Connor]

@Bokan

Mark (Senior Software Programmer/Architect) has already correctly pointed out that these posts are read by him and others.  You already potentially have direct contact with the Affinity Team many of whom have accounts and actually respond, including more than 80% of the programmers and 100% of the Quality Assurance and Tech Support team.

 

We only tend to reply to threads that require an answer (typically made in Questions and the Bugs sections). Therefore most Feedback and Suggestion forum posts are not replied to by the staff, unless it happens to be the very first post by a new forum user, where we try to give them a polite "Hello". Please note that there are more than 8,000 topics in this forum (inc the iPad sub forum) and some of those topics make multiple suggestions. Any system where you had to look through >1000 suggestions before you decided whether yours was (or was not) a new suggestion would put too much emphasis on you to check first, whereas this way you get to say what you want even if it has been said many times before. The search system is there (top right) and tags have been used by many users, though not consistently.

 

We are considering putting together a "Frequently Requested" type list in a pinned post here so existing threads can be read and added to if the customer wishes, but it will not be exhaustive, it cannot be. Even that will look like favouritism of one suggestion/thread over another so it is likely to upset some.

 

So I ask in all seriousness, as you say there are "so many simple things missing" Do you have any experience of a commercial company, (preferably that is larger than just a few employees) whose Support practices you think are done right? We will be changing some of the processes here in the future and I would love to see some other companies approaches before we commit.

 

Patrick Connor

Head of QA

[Cedge]

Patrick
I do in fact have just such experience, having conducted alpha and beta testing for a now defunct graphics application, out of Taiwan. Some things struck me as being very positive when i began lurking on this forum and observing the interaction the Serif staff has with the users. It is not always this way with other companies. Back then we had to beg for even the chance to do testing.  We then put up with being mistreated by the developers and staff and we were generally ignored when we submitted problems or suggestions, outside of the testing cycle. I even had a product manager tell me, in very colorful terms, that the testing teams would never be taken seriously, simply because the members were not Asian. Let it suffice to say that cross cultural bliss and understanding did not exist. We did it for the love of the application and to support the user community.  The only reward was a free copy of the upgraded product. Sadly, they are no longer in the market place and a very competent and powerful application died directly from their neglect.

I tip my hat to the Serif staff for what I personally know to be almost unprecedented access. We're not all as abusive as the couple of users that I've watched make total fools of themselves. Thanks for the open beta. It shows you recognize the users as an important research resource, one that you probably couldn't afford, otherwise. It's nice to be appreciated.... on both sides of the veil.

Steve

[v_kyr]

Project development teams usually have and use internally such things like an among the involved devs/people shared bugtracking system, priority todo lists, a CVS etc. So the Serif people will have and use for sure too, since otherwise they would not be able to keep an overview about all project and product involved aspects here. - However, they just don't made some of these, like a bugtracking or feature request system, end user publicly accessable. BTW such systems also need a constant moderation and continous review and categorizon of input then, similar as done here in the forum manually through their reading now.

[Patrick Connor]

@v_kyr

All you say in that post is true. We use bug tracking systems and QA do write (internally visible) reports on bugs and improvements using an industry standard tools like JIRA, trello and Teams.

We have in our previous incarnation had a (secret)   external beta team to test out Serif Plus range. Those beta testers also wrote JIRA reports, but it is daunting for newbies to make full bug recipe and so a lot of responsibility fell onto a few confident long term volunteer testers, and getting full coverage proved to be hard work.

 

The Affinity approach of customer betas on public facing forums is working well for us and we are told quickly when we break an existing  feature in the beta or don't implement a new feature correctly.

However this willingness of Serif staff to listen and respond to the complaints or bugs in the beta forum leads our customers to have a similar confidence that their ideas and feature requests are going to be dealt with, with the same enthusiasm, vocal-ness and timeliness as we do for bug reports. It's just not possible. Fixing bugs takes hours or days. Adding features takes weeks and months. In order to get the software features implemented, other things need to be implemented first, and we have quite a lot planned out. So even if we had a wholly transparent suggestion and voting system, the most popular thing would be interesting to us but would still not be the next feature to be done. The developers choose the feature based on an overall plan which is appropriately influenced and added to by customer input here.

[Cedge]

Patrick
The value of having a large test group would appear to outweigh most of the negatives, at least from my casual observation. Ours were small (40 user) groups with a single point of contact (that would have been me) who was designated to submit daily updates and reporting documentation for any problems that we found. Once we eventually established communications with the company's US staffing, things became a bit more friendly, on both sides. The adversarial nature of the relationship never completely died. I finally burned out, after about 5 version release cycles, and went my own way. It's certainly far more fun than how we had to deal with things. I'm really enjoying participating in the current beta, without all those distractions. How you're doing things isn't wrong and the lines of communication and your open online presence is really quite refreshing.

Steve
 

[v_kyr]

Yes those overall development, maintenance and service aspects, the logistics and efforts around this, is something every developer knows who is (or was) involved in any bigger team software projects. The internal communication among the involved parties is during critical phases (...important changes, bugfixes, new release rollouts etc.) always very high here, especially for distributed development. And there always have to be still those good (or bloody hated) soules on top, which keep an eye on the overall schedule, budget and what the initial plan said for the next milestones.

However the overall problem for developers here is mostly, that end customers often don't have any clues and seldom care much of these aspects, since they are not this directly involved in all the underlayed work, design and coding work internas. They also don't know and can judge if anything is feasible or not and what rat's tail of problems certain things can possibly cause.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, Patrick Connor said:

@v_kyr

...We have in our previous incarnation had a (secret)   external beta team to test out Serif Plus range. Those beta testers also wrote JIRA reports, but it is daunting for newbies to make full bug recipe and so a lot of responsibility fell onto a few confident long term volunteer testers, and getting full coverage proved to be hard work...

I did such things some years ago a lot for Borland (Inprise) and some other well-known companies during special development partner programs, though here more for development tools and IDEs etc.  - Yes it's a lot of work to make meaningful reports, to write example test cases and to communicate in a way others can reproduce, retrace and understand the found problems. And the more complex the software is, the more dependencies, possible bugs and the more time consuming are such tasks. - But it must be done and is important, since there are often things in testing, that you do not even get used to as a developer, but others already try out even some very abstruse stuff, you never would have thought about to check.

[Cedge]

V_Kyr
There will always be that user who thinks their personal priority must also become the developer's top priority as well. I've seen any number of users get into a snit leave a community, when things just didn't go quite their way. Heck, I'm a rather recent arrival here and I have already witnessed it happening  a couple of times, here. You're also correct in noting that the loudest demands always seem to come from those who have the least clue a to what the implementation would require. I've noticed a few areas in AP that need some attention, but I'll take a while to observe and learn the local customs before I venture into those waters. Luckily, I know the difference between a well mannered suggestion and a raving demand for attention. I'd rather avoid blindly poking anyone with sharp a stick.

Steve