We often talk about the development work going on in the background at The Student Room but I thought it might be interesting to explain how work requests come about and how we manage them, from small bug fixes to larger scale projects.
Bug fixes, small tasks
These tend to originate from a TSR member pointing out some functionality that’s not working, or a template that doesn’t look quite right. Members generally report these things in AAM and in the About Forum. They tend to be quite small problems that usually don’t seriously impede a members use of the site, rather they are an annoyance (albeit an extreme annoyance in some cases).
Examples of this sort of request recently finished, or currently being worked on:
- thousands of PMs but not really
- spoilers in rep comments not working
Medium sized tasks to large projects
Medium to large scale projects come from a variety of sources. As well as keeping an eye on what key competitors are up to and general web trends; site surveys are an excellent method for us to get new feature ideas from the whole community, we usually run a big site survey to gauge opinion a couple of times a year the last was Jan 08.
We get suggestions posted by members in the About forum in particular in the user wishlist. Meeting students face to face at focus groups and usability sessions, meeting and talking to the site Moderators these things all contribute to the overall direction the site takes which then break down into individual projects.
Examples currently being worked on or planned:
- homepage customisation
- colour customisation
- Site homepage design updates and some cross site design improvements
- more features for the forum side bar including subscribed threads and subscribed forums
- Enhanced university profiles
- improvements to site search
We have a team of three developers on The Student Room, two of whom only work half their time on the site, so effectively we have the output of two full time developers.
The developers balance their work between large projects and bug fixes. There’s always an awful lot of work to be done so prioritisation is very important.
We use an online work management tool to help us order all our projects and prioritise them so developers know which to work on. Next week I’ll post more about how that all works.
