09-12-2006, 10:00 PM
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Developer & Designer, News Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 12,959
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Windows Mobile Team Blog: I'm Just A Feature
"In my spare time, I write a lot of little applications for my Windows Mobile devices. For instance, my son was learning his multiplication tables, so I wrote a Math Quiz app for him and handed my Smartphone over whenever we had time to kill. Part of the fun of being able to write apps for your phone is that you can say, "I wish I had this," and then make it happen. But the real fun is that writing quick little apps is nothing at all like real software development. I banged out a fully functional MathQuiz app in an hour and a half, tested it a bit, and then gave it to him to use. He suggested some things (you haven't lived until you've taken feature requests from your eight year old), I spent another hour adding the things he wanted, and that was that. Unfortunately, software development is rarely like this. The only reason I could get away with such a pain free development cycle is that my target audience was extremely small. Windows Mobile, on the other hand, has millions and millions of users. Developing something for one or two people is easy. Developing something for millions of people never is."
Mike Calligaro at the Windows Mobile Team Blog has written a great article about the pains and gains of Windows Mobile feature development. This is something we often rant about. Why doesn't Windows Media offer such and such? Why is Word Mobile a glorified notepad? Why doesn't the close button actually close?! Mike's comments may not apply in 100% of all cases. For example, you probably don't need to translate the close button into twenty-five languages. :lol: But for everything else, this article should answer your burning questions.
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09-12-2006, 11:27 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Dec 2006
Posts: 426
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Quote:
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After focused testing, the feature is put into a nightly build so that everyone on the team can �dogfood� it. We have a concept here we call �eating our own dogfood.� Basically, this means that, throughout the development of the product, all of us are using it on our own phones. We generally will not ship a product that didn�t have significant dogfood exposure (minimum hundreds of users for multiple months). When we�ve finished coding all the new features, we�ll spend a couple of months doing both focused testing and dogfood. We also hold ourselves to doing testing and dogfood of bug fixes. In general, the final release comes a week after the last bug was fixed, and generally three to four months after the final feature was added.
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An informative read and a very likeable character.[/quote]
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09-13-2006, 07:54 AM
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Pontificator
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 1,043
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One feature would please 100% of those millions of users, guaranteed. Reliable alarms and calendar reminders. WITHOUT benefit of third-party hacks! This was the first and the most important feature for which I initially purchased a Casio E-115, and it remins one of the most vital, central aspects of my day-to-day use. Thankfully, Whittaker-Moore's SuperAlert has been providing me with system-overriding reminders with close to 100% reliability (it gets dodgy once in a while, if I enter a new appointment after the midnight polling, but even then usually rock solid) for years now. Why, oh why, can they not settle this long standing foolishness? So much energy devoted to push email, features in WMP, even trivialities such as interface skinning, and yet this glaring hole in core functionality remains.
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Linear Mode
