Requirements gathering using blogs...

Mike Chambers has a post on his blog asking Flashers to describe their dream ActionScript Editor. While this is a good community exercise, this would be an excellent way to get ideas for the next version of the product. I'm not sure how Macromedia is going to use the information, but most product managers when the look at all the feature sets asked for by the users staring at them like this, would feel inclined to use at least 50% of them...

Let's take for example, take the ability to enhance the commenting feature. Here are some of the responses (most describe the functioning of the users' favorite software):

• the ability to select several lines of code and with one button comment those lines (even if the lines are already commented). This is a feature that Directo
• Ability to easy add JavaDoc style comments
• Ability to parse JavaDoc comments into XML for component packaging
• ability to hide/show comments
• to be able to place customizable bookmarks in the margins that link to external files with comments
• block commenting, code hinting for user defined functions, code templates (like homesite) for custom blocks of code you use all the time
• inbuilt commenting/doc engine
• collapsable functions and comments
• way to view a function and it's comments, without leaving the call on the function
• Multi-line commenting (ala director)
• XML style code commenting ... like in C Sharp
• the ability to insert embedded swfs (or flas) into the code comments
• the ability to define regions of code that comments belong to
• post a comment using your mobile phone

Now enter the product manager, who looks at all this set of features that are sitting in front of him/her and wondering "Wow! This is how I will be able to deliver a user centered product with all the features the users want"

However, this is NOT user centered design. Ask a user to describe their dream product and you'll get all sorts of answers. You can't add all these functionalities!

Now I'm not suggesting that the Product Managers at MM are planning to go this route, but in a smaller software company like mine, this is a great risk.

In fact, the next step at this point would be to accertain why the particular requests are coming up in the first place. What is the motivation? In this case I see only two:

• The need to make code managable
• The need to make documentation out of comments

You can solve the above goals either by giving an excellent (read bloated) commenting feature or you could use this information to think outside the box and come up with an innovative way to make the code more managable.

I wonder which way Macromedia will go...

Posted by Navneet at June 4, 2003 09:47 AM | TrackBack | Comments disabled due to spam