Product development is hard. You have hundreds of customers and thousands of requests. It is impossible to please them all. You may bury the product with blind requests implementation, it is not a news for anybody. You should maintain clear vision and balance like a rope-walker all the time.
During last 11 releases we added new functionality. There was maybe 1 release targeted to peformance and usability improvements, but most of the releases targeted new features: integration, customization, horizontal features, vertical features, etc. We decided to stop.
Next several releases will be dedicated to performance, usability and design improvements. Here is what we are going to do:
- Unify design of the application and make it cool and attractive.
- Provide outstanding functionality for lists manipulation. People spend much time with data in lists (filtering, editing, etc). All lists will be fully customizable. It will be possible to create a list with any filter, grouping, inner lists, etc. It will be possible to inline edit everything in all lists. All that will be based on ExtJS grid and as a client side solution it will be faster than everything else.
- We have about a hundred of really nice requests/ideas/solutions from our customers regarding usability. We are going to implement most of them. Especially email notifications, personal customizability, lists manipulation, navigation, reporting.
- Improve overall performance twice.
These are our goals for the next several releases. Maybe quite many of our customers will not be happy. They demand new features like Eclipse integration, CC.NET integration, extended time tracking, budgeting inside TargetProcess, etc. But great performance and superior usability will bring more benefits to all of them.
We are feeling that it is time to eliminate many medium and small problems in TargetProcess to be able to move it forward with greater success.
Labels: future, performance, release, usability
posted by Michael Dubakov @ 11:36 PM
11 Comments:
I am really happy that you guys decided to stop the feature rain and concentrate more on UI, usability and performance.
great job
Sounds good to me! We spend a lot of time in lists and the improvements will be most welcome.
I understand the decission. The usability and performance is very importante for the acceptance of a tool. But be carefull with all the custimization features. They should be available for advanced user, but for normal user the default functionality (lists, filters, etc.) should be enough to do they job and easy to use. A good a example are the reports which I can generate for a project or program. The default reports are very easy to use and they are usefull. I can customize (enable or disable a chart) it. If I need something very special then I have the possibility to create a custom report from scratch (never did until yet ;-).
On the other side the integration of Targetprocess into the development environment of your customers is very important too. If an integration in the developer suites (e.g. eclipse) would exists the acceptance of the developer to TP would increase. The same is for the integration in the most comment continous integration build servers. If I understand it correctly the integration modules for example for eclipse don't will change or affect the core of TP. It is on its own. So this would be a very great feature which could be done on parallel without affecting the refactoring and redesigning of TP.
What you think about that?
2mleo
I agree with both your points. We going to preserve all default lists and screens which you have now in TargetProcess, but add a possibility to customize them and create new lists and screens if required.
I do agree that integration does not affect core (almost) and can be done in parallel. But I think development team should be focused during release development and it is better to have 1 goal like better performance or better usability than server goals.
The only thing we complain about using TP is usability. I think it has too many features already. I'm very glad you made this decision. ExtJS is an awesome tool. It's great for everyone.
Can you provide a roadmap of sorts for the next 1-2 iterations?
MYLYN - General Eclipse integration and Mylyn in particular is going to be a very important competitive advantage. Mylyn could be only reason why a team may use another tool.
MYLYN integration is in plans with quite high priority. But it will be added yearly next year after v.3.0 release. There is no plans to include it in 2-3 next releases.
Currently we are working on new lists. As a prototype we've created reports engine results based on ExtJS grid. In current iteration we are adding sub-lists (or inner lists). For example, in report engine it will be possible to create user stories report that contains tasks, bugs and test cases reports for each user story. Also we are adding inline editing. It will work in sub-lists as well.
In the next iteration we will add batch actions and other special cases for lists. Then we will replace all original lists in TargetProcess with ExtJS lists.
Some other features for next iterations:
1. Better top menu (with customizable sections)
2. Design replacement with new skin
3. Views pages refactoring (ExtJS again)
4. Email notifications improvements (more customizations, templates, etc)
I can't provide full list so far, it will be combined during next week.
I would also like to congratulate you on making this choice.
Improving the content of the TP e-mail notifications is THE largest complaint that our team has about TP. Essentially they are ignored by most people.
Fixing them plus allowing in-line edit for all fields ( including custom ones ) will leave us with very few "problems" with an otherwise excellent tool.
Sweet.
I was recently informed during a support call (two in fact) that you are working on TFS integration for the new year (Jan). My purchase of TP really comes down to TFS integration for defects. Am I now being told something different?
I am really sorry in fact. However things change and our vision changes as well. Roadmap is not a rule of thumb and we do change it often. We indeed had plans (2 months ago) to add TFS and Eclipse integrations till the end of this year, but decided to improve usability/performance first. TFS is still important and on the top of features requests. It will be implemented in the first half of the next year. BTW, we do have Visual Studio 2008 integration already as well as Source Safe integration. Could you provide desired features of TFS integration?s
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