Part 1: Maintenance Development strategy
As so many already know, IDM's development model is largely user-driven. That is, if a user provides us a feature or enhancement request, we track that request and trend it by category and frequency. When we enter a development cycle, we specifically target features that our users have shown an interest in. This uniquely focuses our efforts on the specific needs of our user community. We have been doing this for better than 14 years and the result is phenomenal. No matter what kind of user you are, our product has been optimized for you by users like you.
Presently, IDM is in a "maintenance" development cycle and I wanted to highlight how this important process works. I touched upon this in last month’s, "Building the IDM community...." blog post and have extracted some of that post for discussion purposes here. As we discussed in the comments of the blog post, even our maintenance process follows a user-driven process:
Once the issue is indeed found to be a bug, we then categorize the bug severity and assign a priority. If the problem is severe (such as a macro fails, app hangs, crash, etc.), it is immediately given to our engineering division as a HIGH priority for prompt action. Once a fix is developed we then pass the hotfix to our QA for testing and back to the customer to ensure that the hotfix resolves the users problem. After this process is exhausted, we make the hotfix available for public download as an unofficial release.
It is important to embrace that the process is very dynamic and the turnaround for a HIGH priority issue is usually the same or next day if severe. If it takes us longer, we remain in contact with the user until the issue is retired.
So what happens to the Medium and Low priority bugs? The same verification process happens but afterwards, the bug is placed into our tracking software, sorted by component, priority and assigned to our in-house development team. They in turn estimate the time it will take to correct the problem and schedule it as a work item based on priority and existing work flow.
At IDM, we have a unique development advantage in that we depend on the same software as our users do. That is, the solution we publish for our user community is the same solution that we ourselves use in our daily computing. Consider programmers who create financial accounting packages. The programmers are not likely accountants, they are programmers – Even though they write accounting software, they primarily use other software for their daily computing. We on the other hand, not only publish powerful file management tools, we use them every day to do our jobs. This provides us the practical experience and unique insight as a member of the user community in which we serve.
The difference here at IDM is that our engineers are a true reflection of our user community. We understand the needs of our customers and uniquely relate to them on a personal level because we use IDM software on a daily basis and we share the same user experience as you do. Because of this common bond, you can be sure the attention we give ongoing development, maintenance development, or feature requests is not only grounded in the best interests of our users but also grounded in our unique understanding of your specific needs...
For those interested, Part II of this post; Emphasis on Quality will be featured in May’s IDM Highlights Newsletter.
Thanks for trusting IDM as your solution provider.
-RichComment on this post
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