allenf said:
Dan said:
*snip*
Dan,
You've forgotten the following. And yes I know that Channel9 is being developed by 2(maybe 3 college intern devs).
- Hard Dates of when features/functionality will be delivered on the on the site. Miss a date and you're gone.
- Jeff Sandquist committing to the site again publically. Jeff either invest in Channel9 or shut it down.
- Feature/Improvement/Fix lists (Be transparent about what you're working on, on the site)
- Feature Voting (We're your stakeholders...surely your practicing scrum. So why not let us help you prioritize the bug fixes? I'd love to give input on feature priorities but me thinks you'll never be that transparent)
Btw, is Duncan still around?
Adam Kinney used to be the primary dev...but I've lost track of who actually are the developers on channel9.
Maybe having weekly videos with the dev team would help.
Thanks, I'm hoping we can keep this conversational and not attacking/snarky (ex: calling the dev team interns can be considered insulting, but I'm assuming you meant that they are brilliant, good-looking people and not horribly jaded like me 
)
1. My concern with dates is that the #1 thing we've heard is that quality is more important over dates. Meaning that given the option of doing something right that will increase the long term quality of the site and having that push out dates is a good thing. Another
way to say this in the classic project triangle is that we're optimizing for Good, not Fast.
2. Jeff's committed, that's for sure, I'll have him chime in on this thread
3. Agree here, the problem is that communication gets de-prioritized over other work (like covering an event, a product launch, writing code, Channel 9 Live, etc).
4. Perhaps, I do know Jamie and some other niners had the usertaskforce going for a while
This is probably a good time to talk about how we take feedback. We have a couple of sources for where we take feedback and how we set our priorities. In terms of how we take feedback:
- There's immediate feedback mechanisms like the Contact Us link below for when there is a spammer, bad behavior, or site issues.
- Then there are the forums like the Feedback and coffeehouse
which certainly get suggestions, questions and ideas for improvements (like this thread).
- Finally, there's our user survey, where we ask customers to tell us what they want (content & features) and to rank the importance of site features.
- Further, there was a community effort started to use Long's user task force to submit requests (http://channel9.usertaskforce.com), but this hasn't had additional submissions in the last year
and appears to have fizzled out.
When taking feedback, one thing I've learned is to ensure the feedback you get is a representative sample. For example, if the highest requrest feature had 10 votes, it may appear that we should obviously do this. The problem of course is the small number
of votes could mean that this feedback isn't really representative as 10 votes is 1/10th of 1% of the total views that just one of the videos on the home page video will get in a week (assuming 10K views).
In terms of transparency, one issue that occurs when our team is working on features we can't disclose yet. For example, when we started doing Channel 9 Live, a good amount of work went into figuring out how smooth streaming works/scales, redundancy, and
more. I'm sure there will be more examples of this that cause us to not be transparent about what the dev team is working on (ex: Silverlight 7, IE 15, Windows 9).
Hope this helps,
-Dan
Thread Closed
This thread is kinda stale and has been closed but if you'd like to continue the conversation, please create a new thread in our Forums,
or Contact Us and let us know.