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HomeHomeOur CommunityOur CommunityGeneral Discuss...General Discuss...Revenue from commercial modules?Revenue from commercial modules?
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12/8/2009 11:10 AM
 

Tony Hussein wrote
 

Why are module developers getting too many support issues? Bugs in their modules? Issues with DNN integration? Requests for new features? what?

Yes, yes, yes, yes and more.  :)

Tony Hussein wrote

If the module has bugs, it's the developer's responsibility to produce a reliable tested module.

If you can do this, you win the developer God award.  You'll need to test in about a thousand different configurations, and even if your module works properly it's still your fault if it breaks the XYZ module I already have installed.

Tony Hussein wrote

Common questions can be added to the FAQ. If I get questions that are already in the FAQ, I would tell the person it's in the FAQ to get them to use the FAQ. What's the point of investing in a FAQ if users are too lazy to search.

Read these forums for a week and tell me if there's anyone on the planet who searches for an answer on their own.  :)

Tony Hussein wrote

Feature request can be replies with a canned reply that it will be considered. Yes support is getting more expensive to provide. Reliable and easy to use modules will deflect a lot of these costs.

They don't, they haven't and they never will.  85% of the work in development is support, and it's 99% of the cost to the developer.  That fact won't ever change.  If you can't handle it, you don't want to be in the software business.

Jeff

 
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12/9/2009 6:16 PM
 

I use search here a lot. I I have bitched more than once here about search by author not working in the forums. Actually I have never seen it working. Broken since joined the forums. To me it's broken since day one.

Developers who spend too much time in support are developers who develop poor software. When I develop software, I make it easy to use, has good user usability, extensive help and so on.  Even my error messages are verbose. They have reasons why the error happened, what to do about them, easily copyable to the clipboard and for major issues, I get email message automatically so I can fix them right away.  (talking about internal apps here). I empower the use to help themselves before they ask for help from me. This way I cut most of the support issues.

 

 
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12/9/2009 11:21 PM
 

Tony Hussein wrote

Developers who spend too much time in support are developers who develop poor software.  

I beg to differ. I write good software (it is my passion) - I spent WAY too much time on support. Obviously quality of software has an affect on support time - but the primary reason is that most users expect support for free and have way too high expectations. The amount of time I spent on support ultimately killed my business (Smart-Thinker commercial module development) - if I could do it again I would change my licensing module and charge people for support (of course, where the support has occured because of a bug (my fault) it's free - but a lot of issues are configuration or integration issues. If I had a penny for each customer who said "Here's my Host details - just log in and fix it please" I would be a lot richer than I am now...

You have to plan out your support and build it into your licensing/budget. It will be the biggest part of your committment if your module has more than 100 lines of code...


Entrepreneur

PokerDIY Tournament Manager - PokerDIY Tournament Manager<
PokerDIY Game Finder - Mobile Apps powered by DNN
PokerDIY - Connecting Poker Players

 
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12/10/2009 11:05 AM
 

Tony Hussein wrote

Developers who spend too much time in support are developers who develop poor software. When I develop software, I make it easy to use, has good user usability, extensive help and so on.  Even my error messages are verbose.

 

Wow... are you God?  Seriously dood get off your high horse and come down to the real world.  The other posts here are accurate -- development is really only a small percentage of coding and the rest is maintenance (of which support plays a huge part).  I make my software "easy to use" with "good usability" and "extensive help", etc., but I still spend at least half my time in my day job performing support.  Why?  Because people are generally inept when it comes to software. 

I think what you're really trying to say is that developers who spend a lot of time resolving BUGS as their support are the ones who develop poor software.  Yes, a program chock full of bugs can be considered poor software but a piece of software that has a lot of support calls does not necessarily make it bad.


-- Jon Seeley
DotNetNuke Modules
Custom DotNetNuke and .NET Development
http://www.seeleyware.com
 
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12/10/2009 12:07 PM
 

Jon-

Is dood the high class British version of dude? (I say tomato you say tomauto) 

 
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