On Fri, 25 Jun 2010 12:33:51 +0200, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
Hey
On 25.06.2010 10:56, Rupert Horstkötter wrote:
The goal should be, as DenverD rightly oulined, to actually get a better understanding of the actual demand/problems/need of the user community = our customer!
You have a very romantic view on development :) If developers listen a lot to what users want then the software will be better.
"Better" is very much in the eye of the beholder. But certainly if developers listen to what users want, the software will better meet the users' needs. Put another way, software developed with the user in mind (and I'm not saying here that anything isn't developed without the user in mind) tends to be more successful. Try doing software development without a needs analysis and see how successful the software is.
The reality is slightly different. A free software developer needs to carefully route and filter all the input he gets to be able to do what he's supposed to do: hack. That's why this area is so heavily seeded with tools that standardize communication and help the developer to process it.
As long as a medium (like the fora) doesn't provide the developer with a reasonable amount of input and the means to quickly process it they will never be attractive for them.
Sure, and that's why the discussion of how to interrelate between these two groups is so important. Some say "use bugzilla", and sure, that's one option. But for the users, bugzilla isn't always the most convenient way to report problems. Many users don't know what details to provide in order to get the bug addressed. I have a very strong technical background and I often will not open a bug until I am able to identify with specificity what *exactly* the problem is - and if I don't know what exactly is broken, I want to find out before opening an issue. Which means having an informal chat with someone who *does* know what I should be looking for to make the bug report *useful*. Now if someone with my technical background sometimes has trouble identifying what information would be useful, what's it going to be like for someone with no technical background at all? I work in my day job alongside a large number of non-technical people who are expected to raise issues in bugzilla; they find it cumbersome and confusing, because bugzilla is a tool developed by developers *for* developers, not for the average end user. You (and I for that matter) may look at it and say "what's so confusing about it?", but our perspective on what's easy and what isn't is different than someone with no technical background. It's very difficult to put oneself in another's shoes and have that "aha, now I see what's confusing about it" moment. Then there's also the 'cultural' difference between devs and non- technical users. It's not uncommon for a dev - trying to be brief and use their time effectively - to write something that comes across as brash or even downright rude. It may not be intended to be that way, but that's how it comes across, and that puts the users off trying to report issues. So it comes down to bridging that gap and making sure communication happens between end users and developers - even if through an intermediary who can speak to both 'cultures'.
You can kick and scream all day that developers HAVE TO to read the forums. It's simply not attractive for them so they won't. BTW they don't read our user lists (like opensuse@o.o) either. They never have and they never will.
Well, Henne, you know that's not 100% true; I've seen Wil Stephenson (for example) out in the opensuse-users list as well as several of the other KDE developers. Some developers will take the time to do so, and some won't - that's certainly true and a fact of life. But to say that no developers will spend time reading things users have to say just ain't so. :-) Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org