Enhancements many users have asked for...

[Graham_Moir]

It seems this is the primary mechanism used by Sparx to decide how to prioritize changes.   While I agree it is important to respond when there is a weight of opinion pushing for something, I also think this is an incomplete and flawed approach.   If companies only did what many people asked them for, there would be no innovation, no new products to catch the imagination, e.g. no iPod, no iPhone (although Apple don't have a monopoly on this) etc..  

I would suggest that quite a few of the suggestions here and their associated feature requests, would not occur to most people using EA,  so there will never be a "weight of opinion" about them, but a proportion of these suggested changes would increase the usability and power of the product, and move it towards really being a killer tool.   Those people who did not see the need before would suddenly be on board with these changes, and would accrue the productivity gains.  That can only lead to a positive snowball effect for Sparx.  

So, in my view, Sparx should have a process whereby forward looking open minded personnel look at feature requests to assess how useful to the whole EA community a change may be, even though only a single user has requested it.   Those changes should then be developed alongside the most requested enhancements.

[qwerty]

IIRC we have asked for that about a thousand times :-(

q.

[Graham_Moir]

Ah.  I wasn't aware of that, sorry.  

I know we've asked for transparency relating to where bugs/feature requests are in the priority queue, but I didn't think we'd asked for more of an open minded approach to assessing feature requests instead of just parking them into a black hole because only one person has made the request.

[qwerty]

I'd say it's all along the same line. If people knew how bugs are prioritized that would open the view towards enhancements. All those systems treat bugs and enhancements in two parallel categories. Anyhow, Sparx is open minded enough to keep this forum running. But something (someone?) is preventing them from also opening bugs and feature request in a more public manner.

q.

[Helmut Ortmann]

Hi,

it's a difficult issue. We, modeler, nerds, or people who are interested in the best tool of the world are saying what SPARX has to make.

Sorry, SPARX is a business company. They want to sell licenses. They want to earn money for their stakeholders. They have the responsibility for their success. Nobody of us will help SPARX if they have problems about their product strategy.

We can try to cooperate with SPARX. We can try to influence SPARX. We might can do more.

In this forum are few people who really decides on budgets and strategy.

Business is no democratic process. If you give it a second chance it's more democratic than most of us thought. If we don't buy they will quickly learn their lesson or disappear.

Sorry, we will never be satisfied.  

It's ok demanding features or.... In my point of view it's not ok to rant on the SPARX behavior. They are responsible.

We decide which tool we buy.

Helmut

[webfox]

Folks,

while I understand your frustration, you should try to view things from different angles. Firstly, people using this board do not necessarily represent the average EA "user". Secondly, Sparx get feedback not only from this board but also from other sources (for example feature requests). Thirdly, people at Sparx have their own opinion and/or product strategy. All these factors ultimately decide which features are implemented, how they are implemented, and also their priority.

It is OK to question this process, but be aware that Sparx do not need to be "transparent" as Helmut already mentioned; they are a company, they have complete control over that process, and they can choose the extent to which they make that process transparent to their user base.

On the other hand, it may not be wise to repeatedly ignore feedback from certain user groups as it will result in dissatisfaction, irritation, or even profit loss.

A way of dealing with this is to make all feature requests (from any source) public and to put them in one central place. One example of such a platform is the feedback forum provided by http://www.uservoice.com (N.B.: I am not associated with them in any way, this is just an example of how it would look like). One specific example is the Windows Phone uservoice forum at http://windowsphone.uservoice.com. Users can (a) add their own feature request and (b) "vote" on existing requests (using a limited number of available votes). Feature requests could also be added by the vendor (e.g. Sparx) and they would be able to moderate or modify requests submitted by users.

Just an idea.

Cheers,

Till