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This is often a bit of a problem for lone developers working on a product or a service. How can they get the word out about their product?
I recently finished a project of mine and I'm struggling a bit to spread word of it.
What do you think is the best way to promote your new product/service?
Although this question isn't strictly programming related, it's a good question for programmers wanting to get their creation out and about.
You should have a short tutorial explaining what your product does and how to use it without having to install anything or fill out a single form. I'm not exactly sure what AnyHub (The OP's website) does with my files, how I would share or manage them or why you are doing it for free.
Look at Web 2.0 sensations and see how they streamline the process from hit to customer. For example Twitter has the What, Why and How buttons right there on the front page and nothing else to distract you from them. It also has motivating testimonials there too, and is themed to represent the idea.
Also, you should be trying to find a point of pain that many people have and try to ease that. Twitter knows it is getting impossible to tell your friends what you are doing via email, sms, blogs, feeds, rss and so on so takes care of it. What do you provide (other than an alternative pricing model?) Tell me on your website.
The internet (obviously).
If you're going at it alone, grassroots via Blogging, Facebook, and Twitter work.
You can also purchase google ad words, and other ad-related venues.
You can consider an open source version of your project, or joining tradegroups/ forums related to whatver problem your product addresses, and start to build a following (but please DONT spam these groups).
Mobile phone applications are really easy to promote nowdays, thanks to Apple's iPhone App Store paradigm. Now all major players (RIM, Nokia, Palm, etc) are opening their own application stores which takes away much of the promotion effort from the developer. As long as your application, game, etc is interesting it will sell by itself. Nevertheless, everything depends on the first week you launch your app and it is up on the list of the newest arrivals.
In the desktop world things are more difficult although Sun recently announced a similar promotion scheme for Java applications. More might follow, but it will depend on Sun's success or failure.
I believe (and actually hope) that centralized "selling services" will be the primary way of buying applications, games, plug-ins, services, etc in the near future. It is far too convenient to pass.
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I just installed trac for this project I'm working on, since it's turned out to be a bit bigger than I anticipated. I've added a bunch of tickets with my clients requests which come in the form of emails, phone calls, and meetings. I've also added some stuff I know needs to be done/fixed but they haven't specifically requested. Should I grant them access to trac so they can submit the tickets themselves so I don't have to keep translating (words into tickets) for them? They're very non-technical, so I'm not sure how well it would work; they might open tickets and not provide enough detail, or get confused by all the different fields.
If your answer is "no", should I at least let them view the tickets, so they can see what I'm working on, what's been done, hasn't been done?
My experience (rather small, though) shows that allowing non-technical people to create tickets directly just won't work. You'll finish up editing those tickets yourself and constantly asking for details anyway. If I were you, I'd choose email for feedback and problem reporting.
However, it is a good idea to share existing tickets, read-only. Some people -- even non-technical ones -- are able to learn out of this how to create right tickets. Others would be happy to follow their particular problem while it's being solved.
So much of software development is managing clients and their expectations. Giving them write access to your bug database may suggest to them that they are now directing and in control of the project more than they actually are. Add to that the inevitable questions that will follow ("How do I do X/Y/Z?") and it's a massive headache waiting to happen.
I would consider read-only access but only if the client was technical enough and experienced enough with software development to understand how these tools are used. Otherwise I would stick with much lower-tech but much simpler todos-in-a-text-file, which I find myself using more often than not.
#Brendan Long trust me, it can get much worse when you give people a false perception about how much fine-grained control they have on a project.
At my company, we're struggling to get good problem descriptions in tickets from a technical audience (system administrators, technical consultants etc), and more often than not it takes inquiries from our professional helpdesk before an issue is layed out clear enough for a developer to work on.
Thus, from many years of experience, I would clearly advise against letting all your customers open tickets (unless you can narrow them down to a technical audience) because it will not save you any work compared to e-mails.
Read access is a good idea (because people will still feel much more involved) - you just have to make sure that you do not have too many tickets (usually low prio bugs or requests) that remain in the same state for a long time because this will start to frustrate the person who submitted it (better to close such a ticket in a timely manner if you can't or do not want to work on it, this kind of honesty if usually more appreciated than letting a ticket open for years ,-).
I used to communicate with a client via email and phone, and at some point I realized it was just too hard to keep track of things. I set up an account on Unfuddle (similar to Fogbugz but free), with just accounts for the two of us and it was immensely helpful.
When we first started, I did a lot of editing on new tickets, but it was still much better than keeping track of emails, and she figured out how to create tickets in the form I needed pretty quickly (I assume because now she can see how I keep track of what she's saying).
Anyway, if you're just using email now, it's not like it can get worse ;)
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I am going to be starting a new job in a few weeks where I will be responsible for both the maintenance and development of a couple of existing web applications and the development of new web applications.
As I will be the only developer on the project and the previous developer was more of a hobbyist, no formal project management or planning techniques have been followed. Additionally no bug tracking has been used or if anything has been recorded its just been notes on paper.
I would therefore like to introduce a better system to help resolve some of the issues and help ensure things run more smoothly. I intend to develop using an agile process (likely scrum) and would therefore like to know what all-in-one solutions people could recommend for me to look into further. I am looking for something which will provide at minimum:
Project Planning
Defining new features
Time estimating
Ability to organise tasks by priority
Project Management
Tracking active tasks
Reporting
Bug Tracking
I would also like to let other staff easily submit new bugs in the applications which they find or customers report. Additionally support for them to add new stories / high level tasks would be of use so they can note down other new requirments/features and I can then work with them to outline more detailed tasks and estimates.
So far I have looked at a number of systems including:
FogBugz - Seems great for bug reporting but would need something else for project planning / management
Agile Buddy - This is probably the best solution I have found so far
Trac
Smart Sheets
Pivotal Tracker
However, as I have not actually used any of these systems myself I do not know what ones would be best or whether there is a better solution out there??? So any recommendations you can provide would be much appreciated.
Actually, FogBugz does project management as well. It will even try to learn how accurate time estimates for features are from each user, and give you estimated milestone completion times accordingly, with probabilities of finishing at various dates. I've used it for the bug tracking, and really liked it, but I've also read enough about its project management features to know that it has them, and they're pretty good.
FogBugz feature list
When I was working as a solitary developer, I picked up a copy of Planning Extreme Programming and bought a pack of 3x5 cards and a plastic box for them. I used those in the Planning Game and stuck the ones I was working on on my wall. My boss could walk by and see what I was working on. This worked well and cost little.
We're currently using Zen at work - it's a web-based Kanban board for planning. This is nice when your stakeholders aren't co-located or if priorities/requirements change frequently.
You can enter bugs as user stories with either system, or you could use a separate defect-tracking system.
I'd question if Scrum is suitable for a one-developer shop. It's targeted towards project management. I'd rather not have a stand-up meeting with myself. ;) XP (minus pair programming) works fine for a solitary developer.
For a one-man show, you don't need any tools to speak of.
Tools -- generally -- are for coordination.
If it's just you, what -- precisely -- are you coordinating?
If you want to make things visible, a pair of simple internally-focused web pages built from static content will do.
Bugs.
Burndown for Features.
That's about it. Use the simplest tools you can possibly use. I recommend using docutils to generate the HTML from plain, simple text.
Don't go tool-happy until you have a large enough team that simple text doesn't work any more.
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I'm a blind student who's taking a required UI class. One of the assignments is to take screen shots of both a good and bad application user interface and comment on what's good and bad about it. I'll have a reader help describe the interface to me but would like pointers on applications to check out. They must be windows apps. In answers I'd like a link to the application as well as brief comments on what to focus on in the UI, for example color scheme is horrible, badly labeled controls, cluttered layout, etc.
An interface experience for a Blind person is a relevant aspect of UI design. If I were in your position I wouldn't focus so much on the visual aspect of user interfaces. Go from your personal experience. What is an application that you, as a blind person had a great degree of difficulty using? What applications are a joy to use?
If I were in your teacher's position, I would find such descriptions far more valuable than an attempt at pretending as though you can see, and that things like colors or fonts are relevant to you. (unless you are only partially blind, in which case font size may indeed be a relevant factor)
There are a great many people in my field that are keenly and constantly interested in such testimonials and evaluations from blind people. Not just in an academic context. I work for a government organisation that is required to make its resources accessible to disabled people. Don't sell your own perspective short, just because of a poorly worded assignment.
A little bit old, but quite well written, with plenty of examples: http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/shame.htm
Good: Microsoft Office 2007
Bad: Microsoft Office 2003
As far as Windows applications go, I like Microsoft Outlook as a positive example UI. The layout of Microsoft Outlook has been imitated in a lot of other software. It allows/facilitates quick and easy navigation and searching of a variety of information with very little user effort. It allows the user to see their information in different formats (message preview, list,est.) and to adjust the UI to meet their needs and make the information that is most valuable to them most prevalent/easily acceptable.
I have to assume that you have already done this assignment, but I want to give Breton a thumbs-up for his suggestion. If there is one thing that is most often overlooked, it is consideration for visually impaired users. I often steer aspiring web developers to http://colorfilter.wickline.org/ so that they can run their pages through the various filters. If one takes a screen shot of their application, they can embed it in a web page and run it through the tester also.
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My boss tasked me with finding a sort of system for a customer to be able to log into a website and view their website as a work in progress (so employees would obviously have to be able to upload their work). All communication would be handled through this website.
It sounds like a forum, but customers would not be able to see each others' projects. It's private and the only people who could see all customer projects are employees.
I'm sure I could implement it using a forum and some visibility options, but I was just wondering if anyone knew of any systems similar to this.
Something like Basecamp would work - set up a Basecamp project for each customer/project and only give customers access to the appropriate projects, while your employees could have access to all.
Sharepoint is always on option if you are on the Windows platform. Also might want to look into Mingle. I haven't used it in a couple version, but it showed real promise.
Most of the people I see that sub out a website don't get to view the actual website themselves live on the Internet - because just simply its to easy to copy down the underlying HTML (unless of course much of it is server side scripts, but that's another store). Most of the time they just get screen shots (and perhaps user testing on the developers machine) until most of the money has changed hands.
Why not put up a bulletin board (like phpBB, but not necessarily phpBB) and segregate what each client can see. Then you can post screen shots in each customer's area and let them comment and discuss?
We have a Forum-style section at the bottom of the page (on our DEV sites) where people can add a Comment. The ideas is that a Tester, finding an issue, will check the Comments at the bottom of the page before adding a new (possibly duplicate) Comment.
We allow Assignment of the issues, internally, and then Assigning it back to the Author for Approval, once it is fixed.
Additionally testers mark the page as "Operational" or "Broken". We have a report of pages not-yet--reviewed - so testers can make sure they have achieved 100% coverage.
We have routines that will reset all pages to "Test required" (ready for another round of testing), optionally leaving pages marked as "Broken" at that status, or resetting everything to "Testing required".
We tend to use sub domains for this - so TEST.MyDomain.COM - and have the ROBOTS.TXT set to disallow all search engine spidering - so only those in the-know will find the site. (I suppose you could be more paranoid, and require password-access, but our clients are about to launch the site and not paranoid about outsiders seeing it - indeed, they often ask Customers etc. to have-a-look)
Having said that we do have a "Known user login" which proffers no specific admin powers, but does log any Comments to that specific user - always useful if we can't work out what the heck their Comment actually meant!
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As a contractor, out-sourcer and shareware author,I have about 5-10 projects going on at any one time. Each project has a todo list, requirements need to be communicated to other outsources and employees, status needs to be given to clients, and developer's questions need to be answered.
Sometimes it is too much... but then I realize that I'm not very organized and there has to be a better way.
What is your better way?
How do you keep track of requirements for multiple projects, assign work to multiple developers, obtain and give status for multiple projects to multiple clients?
What tools do you use? What processes?
This may sound really old-tech, but a different set of notepads for each project. Now, hear me out.
I know that notepads aren't searchable, and they aren't indexed, etc. But they will have meeting dates and times (if you've been taking notes during meetings, even on the phone), they have the ability of never crashing, and they're future proof in the event of wondering what you did a few years back but can't remember if the old project files made it to your new hard drive.
But the biggest reason is CYA-- logbooks and notepads can be used in the event of someone suing you as legal documents, especially if you've been diligent about dates. It might also work during patent discussions as well, showing a clear date and time of ideas being made. During another life, I worked in biology labs, and electronic record keeping, because it's so fickle, wasn't allowed for the legal reasons of being able to show that the work you did was your own. That attitude has permeated my own project notetaking, and helping to keep track of everything I need to get done.
You should have a look at No Kahuna Easy to use; Free and Pay versions; active, responsive development team.
tools are not the answer, unless you already have the knowledge, organization, and self-discipline to use them well. i highly recommend Getting Things Done
I'm a big fan of http://trac.edgewall.org/'>trac for managing software projects. It provides task and bug management with integrated wiki and source control.
We have been using FogBugz for managing several projects (10+) and clients (20+) for more than 4 years.
We have a project for each product and another project for each client. In this way I can control the requirements for each product and the pending activities related to each client.
Try Omniplan if you're on a Mac. I find it just makes sense. I also find I don't end up fighting the interface and instead concentrate on using it to help me plan better.
Edit: It goes well with OmniFocus and no, I don't work for the Omni Group :)
If you are into Agile methods (or even if not) you could try some of the Agile tools out there. Look in http://www.agile-tools.net/ for some comparisons. I use xplanner at work where we coordinate requirements and work over iterations among several teams. It has its quirks but it generaly gets the work done and allows for some useful agile structure. I am sure some other will have preferences for more mature tools.
Trac (as Mark Roddy mentioned) is also nice, because it integrates a wiki, task and defect management, so it can be an interesting tool if you have none of those already in place.
I should say that we use Mantis now, but I wish it was better. I wish I could use it for customer-facing queries, I with I could open and assign issues by email.
ScrumWorks Pro looks promising, but amazingly expensive for me, with 15 developers.
AccuNote may be an option, but it is new to me
I'm using the customer support, project planning and issue management portions of OpenERP. Having your issues and feature requests, along with the tasks required to get them done on the same CRM that allows you to manage your customers is a big benefit.
I have used SourceGear Vault to manage all our software projects. Our business nature is very much driven by project basis - typically I have 5 active projects running at one period of time.