Pretty much all my career, I worked with building solutions (customized applications for a single customer). Now that my company is going in developing software for the masses, a lot of packaging is waiting for us. I wanna ask about licensing software. How to generate serial numbers and activation numbers. What are my options for licensi...
I have a billion potential ideas running through my head. About five of those I have actually started and have become "side projects" in addition to my "day job". Some are further along than others, and a few are even demonstrable. The problem I have is that one always takes attention away from the others. I don't want to give up any of ...
My company has tried to adopt the scrum methodology with mixed success. Theses are some areas where we've had issues. How do you handle these? Tracking requirements from Product Marketing through to product. We're trying out JIRA to track all requirements individually and assigning a release to each one as it is picked for implemen...
In an agile (scrum) environment, how do you get product management to create small enough backlog items or stories without having them do all the design, which is not their specialty? In other words, how do you separate the what (business requirements) from the how (design) in agile development? ...
This is more of a product philosophy/software architecture question. If you are writing a business application, groupware, bug tracker, etc. you'd come across a client demanding "I want field XYZ in this entity." You know the field is too specific for the organization's needs and/or the terminology does not fit your product. Do we give...
We have a large backlog of things we should do in our software, in a lot of different categories, for example: New problem areas for our products to solve New functionality supporting existing problem areas New functionality requested by our existing users Usability and "look" enhancements Architectural upgrades to the back-end Bug fi...
How can our team gather requirements from our "Product Owner" in as low friction yet useable of a way as possible? Now here's the guidelines- No posts that it can't be done or that the business needs to make a decision that it cares about quality, yada yada. The product I work for is a small group that has been successful for years. I j...
I have a web based product and am looking to convert that into a product that can be hosted within a firewall (or) hosted locally by the clients. Some of the challenges i foresee are: prevention of piracy support maintaining patches and versions (releases) source control (incase of customization) Please share some of your experience...
I am fairly used to using svn for branching and merging, normally this works fine. However one component was worked on in two branches and basically took the component in different directions, so automatic merge won't work and using beyond compare shows the files as mostly different. I have tried to stitch together some of the files, bu...
We develop a product which is distributed by our clients to their customers. We need to allow the administrator at the client company to make configuration changes to the installer before he sends it out to the end-user. Configuration changes in this case means a couple of registry entries to be made on the end-users computer. How do I d...
What is the best method you have found for deciding whether or not to implement features into your software product? EDIT: Can you recommend some reading material (online or book) for me on this topic? ...
I'm looking to find an user friendly PHP app to manage my client's collection of vintage tools. I can't find ANYTHING to just simply organize his collection. The closest thing I can find is a shopping cart, but that's not what he needs, as he doesn't want to sell his collection. I don't have the time to code this myself and he's getting ...
It is not easy for traditional large software product organizations working in distributed off-shore environments engaged in Product Development to follow the spirit of Agile in Scrum for the following reasons: Their product development is not iterative. The product engineering teams after several rounds of iterative systems engineeri...
What is the difference between a Program Manager and Product Manager? Is there actually a difference in the roles/responsibilities or our the terms mostly used interchangeably. ...
We are building a web based solution right now and it is almost ready to roll out, but I felt we have not really verified our initial hypothesis about the problem domain we are trying to solve. So I decided to attend a conference where most attendees are our target users. What I want to get out from the conference are 1) verify if our...
I am creating a site that includes many products, of each of those products I could have up to 10 images. What I need to do is this: 1: Image #1 - loaded (large) 2: Create thumbnails of each of the uploaded images 3: Place thumbnails under large image 4: When user clicks on a thumbnail it will replace the large image with the one select...
Hey all, As a software shop, we are well accustomed to delivering bespoke applications and solutions based on individual client requirements. For each system, we generally prepare the following documentation (with variations based on the specifics of the job): Vision and scope Requirements specification Detailed design Project specifi...
Since I know there are lots of expert database core designers here, I decided to ask this question on stackoverflow. I'm developing a website whose main concern is to index every product that is available in the real world, like digital cameras, printers, refrigerators, and so on. As we know, each product has its own specifications. For...
Assume for a moment that you are creating a commercial product for SharePoint. This product will be offered in both Community (free) and Enterprise (pay) editions. The code base for the Community edition is a subset with minor deltas all handled through (C#) #define statements. Effectively it's a single code base. The build process b...
I'm curious how other large-scale development shops (web-focused) divvy up the work between Designers, Developers, and HCI/Consumability Experts. Obviously: Developers will be writing code Designers will be responsible for graphical assets and probably some HTML/CSS HCI Experts will be doing usability reviews, coming up with usage sce...