why you can’t always have what you want simon hutchinson – reckon product management
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Why you can’t always have what you want Simon Hutchinson – Reckon Product Management. Tomatoes – Don’t need those!. Overview. The development cycle A few scenarios that regularly occur What about a patch? PSG tells me they sent it on to development but I never hear back - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
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Why you can’t always have what you want
Simon Hutchinson – Reckon Product Management.
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Tomatoes – Don’t need those!
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Overview• The development cycle
• A few scenarios that regularly occur
• What about a patch?
• PSG tells me they sent it on to development but I never hear back
• The typical Reckon development cycle
• Things that can really make things tough
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We’re on your side
• We understand the frustration that occurs when you find issues in our software
• If we could fix absolutely everything we would
• We do take your feedback on board, as you will see later in this presentation
• We take pride in the software we produce and ‘bugs’ hurt
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A few scenarios
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Compliance Changes
• Each year we sit down to determine what will go into the product this year
• These decisions are generally around features that we want to add to improve the product
• As you may know we regularly attend ATO meetings to discuss changes. We are also in close contact with the IRD on changes.
• Often these ATO meetings change our development priorities due to upcoming compliance. The IRD can also throw a spanner in the works.
• Compliance is and always will be the number one priority
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Government Rules
• Regularly when the developers are working on compliance changes they have questions
• There is a hotline and email address setup to deal with these questions from developers
• However they are not allowed to answer questions on draft laws
• Regularly we are working with draft legislation and have to interpret it
• We have to do this to deliver compliance on time to our users
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Government dissolving
• One of the more recent problems occurred when the Federal Election was announced
• This leads to the Government moving into caretaker mode
• In caretaker mode the ATO/IRD is not allowed to answer or talk about any questions directly related to Government policy and law which has not been passed parliament yet
• This caused delays into interpretations of Paid Parental Leave in Australia last year
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External Factors
• As some of you are aware Reckon develops for international markets such as New Zealand and Asia
• Recently the NZ Government has given indications that it is flagging a number of changes to its taxation and revenue systems
• Like in Australia, compliance is the number one priority
• If we had a dollar for each time Australian compliance has cost NZ a feature, we’d be pretty rich by now.
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What happens when I tell PSG about a problem
• This has been one of the issues of angst from the AC/AP network this year
• PSG does tell us of an issue and it gets logged in our bug tracking system
• It is then attempted to be replicated and if it can be, risk assessed
• Sometimes we don’t get enough information to look at the issues
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Information we need
• Operating system and Service Pack
• What version of QuickBooks and if there is a patch installed
• Can you get it to happen over and over again or is it intermittent
• Is it running through Terminal Services
• Brand of computer where applicable
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Reckon Development Process
• Product Management build a draft scope of the features to be included in the product
• Escalations meeting then occurs to decide what needs to be looked at.
• Draft scope is taken to Senior Management and then signed off
• Scope is then presented to the AP Council for feedback
• Discussion about the feedback from AP Council
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Reckon Development Process (cont.)
• Scope is finalised and documents written for development
• QA and Development are shown the documents and ideas for their feedback
• QA and Development are shown the design and changes tweaked based on feedback
• Product is developed and tested
• Beta Test Occurs. Live data fed back to Reckon
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Reckon Development Process (cont.)
• Bug reports are analysed and we try to replicate the issues
• Final testing Occurs
• Product release
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Terms you may hear when dealing with us
• Alpha Phase – Initial development and testing phase
• Feature Complete – The day we lock the products features down
• BETA Phase – A beta test of the Feature Complete product
• Regression – The second last phase. We test that new features have not broken old features.
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QA Processes
• Each defect (bug) with the product is entered with a rating system of tweak through to block.
• A block is something that completely breaks the product. The developers have to fix this issue by the end of the day if possible.
• Examples of block defects include program won’t open, old file not found and payroll won’t calculate any tax.
• The whole office knows when we find a block
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QA Processes (cont.)
• Other bugs are entered into the system with a rating system and priority
• Due to time lines tough decisions need to be made. Frequently towards the end a major becomes a block to ensure that we fix it. Some defects are lowered after more research.
• In general a defect with an acceptable workaround is less likely to be fixed then one where a workaround exists.
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A few other things that affect decisions
• User guides
• Boxes and marketing pamphlets
• Legislation changes
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Why do we not release patches that often?
• Some of you may have noticed the US has in the past released around 20 patches a year
• It is a huge strain on development and has an impact on the business. Cost/Benefit analysis.
• Releasing a patch for issues with a workaround can lead to more issues
• It has an impact on future products
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Patch process
• Gather data from users about operating systems, versions and the issue itself
• Perform an analysis on the risk and the potential impact of the fix
• Determine the scope of the patch process. Confirm that we have the correct fix specified in a document.
• Usual software development life cycle then kicks in.
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AC Council – Your Voice
• As of 2008 we meet with a selected number of AP’s every 3 or so months in Australia to discuss issues. We want to start hearing from NZ AC’s.
• If you have issues, and they are raised via the AC Council, they are discussed with the Reckon departments affected.
• The AP Council in Australia has had significant impact on the release of our products and has been very positive. We hope to do the same in NZ.
• Don’t be afraid to raise problems with them
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Reporting an issue
• Give as much information as possible to us. Operating system, multiuser, what version, what computer system etc
• Submit via PSG
• The more information we have the easier it will be to trigger it in the office.
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BETA Testing
• Most important phase of our development cycle. Giving it to you to try.
• We hear your voices about it breaks my old quickbooks, I don’t have time etc and are improving things
• All future QuickBooks BETA’s will be conducted via the Online Infrastructure. Those who want the actually install files can request them.
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Questions!