Brent Simmons on feature requests

This is a bit old, but it’s a bang-on write-up on the kinds of things developers hear from customers requesting new features or change requests, and some tips on how to submit them effectively. A sample:

Imagine you’re in my shoes: you’re me, for a minute. Think about feature requests, for example - you have a list several hundred items long of really, really good ideas. You’ve heard pretty much everything multiple times, though now and again you do hear new ideas. Which just makes the list longer!

Then of course there are bugs to fix, schedules to meet, tests to run, docs to update, user interfaces to design, lots and lots of things. Most of your time is spent just sitting in a chair, coding, because that’s the only way things get done. (Oh, and then there’s email. And writing blog posts. And so on.)

Okay, to put it in a nutshell - the input is like a firehose, and there’s a ton of work to do, and both things are always true.

It’s excellent stuff and definitely worth the read.

Check out How to manipulate me (or, Tuesday Whipper-Snapping)