Report with the comments of Adrock at 2:50 AM Jul 14 2008
7 comments - Categories: ColdFusion
On Friday, I gave a presentation to internal ColdFusion developers at Adobe (Adobe.com, kuler, etc). It was the final meeting of our user research phase and officially concluded the SyncDev process for Centaur. I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on the process and some of the many conversations we had with developers and how it's shaping the next major release of ColdFusion.
It was very important to us that we met with a large sampling that accurately represented all of our customers. We visited customers who had well over 500 servers to multi-million dollar companies powered by a single Standard license. We talked to developers and managers from small businesses and consultants to large enterprise and government shops. In the end we held 22 formal meetings in 6 different cities. I also held a number of informal meetings on my own in various European cities.
This was my first exposure to the Synchronous Development process. In a nutshell it's an agile approach to system requirements. Each meeting I pitched Centaur as if we had already built it. Developers, Systems Administrators, QA Managers and Directors gave us direct feedback which was then re-factored into the pitch before the next meeting. By the end of the process, I'd say we refined or removed half the features initially planned and came up with an entire new set. Customers of wave 1 and 2 may be surprised to see just how much the product vision has changed.
Boston
Wave 0 and 1 happened in Boston, mostly because ColdFusion's unofficial headquarters is the old Allaire office in Newton, MA. This wave was a lot of fun as Jason, Sanjeev and I were accompanied by Rob Babcock (a member of our internal process team). Rob played the role of master sensei and guided us in the way of SyncDev. It was great to have him participate as he made sure we knew and followed the procedures correctly, which ensured the data we collected was valid and concise.
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