Turning Ideas to Features: An Explanation
We, as consumers, tend to complain a lot. If it isn’t something about Goldilocks thinking the soup is too hot or too cold, it’s a gamer feeling bad because something’s hard to use or confusing. Unlike Goldilocks, we’re lucky enough to talk to someone about those troubles, and some of our thoughts get into an improved build of that program which sports new features.
Over at his blog, Major Nelson did just that, asking gamers what they thought could be done to improve the Xbox 360 Dashboard. One week later, he offers up an important article by Mike Calligaro: an explanation of how ideas get turned into features from the point of view of the developer’s side. While the article was meant for Windows Mobile, the general principle behind the essay applies to just about anything requiring an upgrade, a patch or a tweak.
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We, as consumers, tend to complain a lot. If it isn’t something about Goldilocks thinking the soup is too hot or too cold, it’s a gamer feeling bad because something’s hard to use or confusing. Unlike Goldilocks, we’re lucky enough to talk to someone about those troubles, and some of our thoughts get into an improved build of that program which sports new features.
Over at his blog, Major Nelson did just that, asking gamers what they thought could be done to improve the Xbox 360 Dashboard. One week later, he offers up an important article by Mike Calligaro: an explanation of how ideas get turned into features from the point of view of the developer’s side. While the article was meant for Windows Mobile, the general principle behind the essay applies to just about anything requiring an upgrade, a patch or a tweak.
The first thing a software developer has to keep in mind, and which you have to as well, is the audience for their program. In gaming terms, that’s a few million gamers, depending on your system, and a whole lot more than just a few million if you’re an MMORPG. You’re trying to release new content that helps with the concerns of as many people as possible without messing it up for everyone else.
Imagine your audience is 1,000,000 people; alienating even 1% of your audience with a bad upgrade or something which pleases a lot of people but is disastrous that 1% still means you’re pissing off 10,000 people. Multiply as needed for your base of consumers, and that’s a lot of responsibility right there, and that doesn’t even include pressure from the companies who are selling your product and demanding something in it that could make a lot of people angry.
To take care of this responsibility, software developers need time. Lots of it. It isn’t just for coding something, it’s also for testing it for stability over a period of time and also making sure its secure. “We no longer get to write software that just does what the users need it to do. We now need to write software that does what users need and is hardened against known and unknown attacks by malicious people who will spend years looking for new ways to beat it,” Calligaro notes.
Beyond that, you also have to make sure it works well WITH the software and hardware it was intended to go with. Manufacturers in the mobile phone industry, for one, have to test the software, make necessary corrections/additions/deletions, and then get it back to the original programmers so they can be sure that it’s still stable and secure. As you can probably imagine, it can eat up a lot of time.
Next time you gripe about that patch or that feature, you may want to think back on just how much effort it took to make it work in the first place. Even a homebrewer knows how that feels, and they aren’t paid for what they create.
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