Posted by kika on April 10, 2011 at 3:06pm
Github has an excellent track record merging code and communication. The do not fail to deliver: https://github.com/blog/831-issues-2-0-the-next-generation - lot to learn from there!
Github's Issues 2.0
Group organizers
Group categories
Prairie tags
- exploring solutions (14)
- metrics (4)
- working item (5)
Comments
great stuff here
you're right - there's a lot we can draw from this post - thanks for sharing.
I'm kind of pleased to see that it has a lot in common with the direction we're currently exploring.
leisa reichelt - disambiguity.com
@leisa
Great stuff and meta stuff
I just took time to read the post and all the comments. Not only is the post itself full of great stuff for us to consider, the whole upgrade (as illuminated via the comments) is also some great meta-stuff for us to consider. A few trends I'm seeing and lessons I'm drawing:
GitHub seemed to think their drag+drop prioritization/ordering of issues was "used by only about 10 people" and they dropped the feature entirely. Close to half the comments are pissed off users saying "WTF happened to all my issue prioritization work!?!". We should tread carefully if we're considering removing any functionality.
Lots of comments also complained about the surprise effect -- this was a major overhaul that just appeared some day. People wanted warning, especially since they were losing functionality. We should keep users informed about changes that might impact them before they happen.
The comments posted by GitHub staff in the thread were fairly dismissive. When people started saying "how do we order our issues now?" the official response was basically "screw you, no one really needed that feature". I'm being unfair, but that's definitely how it was perceived. We should be empathetic and mindful when communicating with our users, even if we disagree with them or they're complaining at us.
Leisa probably knows all of this. ;) But, I just wanted to share my reactions after reading the whole post...
And yes, looks like GitHub has done some really great work here, and once again we have a lot to learn from them!
Cheers,
-Derek