developers interacting with us

[jonathan21]

I think its great that some of the developers are here in the forums asking what should be included in future versions of ubuntu.I am loving the idea behind open source and loving ubuntu more everyday.I saw recently a programmer recently interacting with this forum recently about time vault a possible inclusion into the next version of Ubuntu.

Its probably not a new thing but its good that Ubuntu developers interact with forum users it improves a operating system greatly.

Go Ubuntu.

I hope Ubuntu goes far lets hope more manufacturers and programmer support Ubuntu

A Ubuntu fan

[Tundro Walker]

I find it bizarre, because the typical corporate model tries to keep the programmers / developers squirreled away from their users, so they're not interrupted from their coding. Then these "business/programmer analysts" (name varies depending on the company) are used as the go-betweens.

Inevitably you end up playing the "telephone" game, where what the users request gets totally misinterpreted by the time it gets to the programmers. Thus, it wastes more time and money reworking it. And then the testing is done by QA folks, not users, and they test under a limited scope...usually only vary narrow use-case scenarios, instead of a Taguchi "see if it works under extraordinary circumstances, and if it can, then we know it will work under normal circumstances" method.

The dev's at Ubuntu (and quite a lot of other Linux distro's) can work right with the user's, get their feedback, have them test things, etc. It's a pretty good relationship. Cuts out all that middleman crap.

Side Story...

The place I work got bought out by another company, and when it happened, a lot of folks jumped ship. The place was focused on building its own software systems, but did so in a sloppy fashion, so they were pretty bugged, or going down, etc (you get what you pay for rings very true in the programming world, and the company wasn't willing to shell out the big bucks for great programmers).

We lost almost all of our "programmer analyst" & "qa" folks, partly because a lot of them quit and partly because a lot were fired for doing a poor job. The new company, as an interim to getting in some 3rd party OS to manage the company software, decided to focus on bug-fixing the current systems to at least stabilize them for the time being. Without PA's & QA's, the new senior management told the programmers...

"Look, you're gonna have to go up to that dept and SIT with those folks, and watch how they use the system. Don't coach them...just sit back, shut up, and take notes."


The programmers were kinda shocked by this, because they had always been isolated from any user contact in the past. Some were angry about this new turn of events, so they quit. Others decided to go along with it. In 1 week's time, they had stumbled across volumes of revelations that would fill a book. In the next week, they had rolled in a code fix that increased system performance by 250% (speed, productivity, etc). They had shutdown whole sections of the app which were useless, and streamlined other areas that were victims of "decision by committee" bs long ago, and were unnecessarily bloated. It was a pretty big eye-opener for them, and the rest of the company. And yet, the first thing the company did after the sale was finalized was to hire on more PA's to act as buffers between user-programmer interaction. And, when they did, things started suffering again. Sad...

[23meg]

Did you see the new Dev Link forum (http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=265)? We expect many developers to show up there and request user feedback on their work soon (once we start advertising it properly...)

It was initially meant as a place for only official Ubuntu developers (with the appropriate forum rank) to use, but it may be a good idea to slowly move all the "developer requesting feedback" threads in Cafe to there.

[Tomosaur]

It's not really so strange - most Linux distributions have the same developer / user relationship going on, mostly because the developers ARE the users. Anyone can develop their own software, and submit it to be included with the base installation. The forum is a great place to get usability feedback, while launchpad is the place if you want coding help, or technical feedback etc.

[Hobbsee]

Please note that most of the developers doing stuff on ubuntu are not employed by Canonical.

Hence, they can do what they like, in their busy schedule, of work, home life, ubuntu, and whatever else they have on.

Unfortunately, being flamed about bugs, or because we choose what we want to work on (see the first point about developers often being volunteers, so have every right to choose what they'd like to do), and so dont do what a forum user might desperately want, makes it less enjoyable to participate in.

But it is kinda cool, yeah. :)