As a Viking user, you often have all kinds of ideas about new features that we could add, or things that don't work optimally for you. Fortunately, many users share their ideas with us. Unfortunately, we cannot solve every problem immediately. We simply don't have that much time.
How do we determine our 'roadmap' and the ideas we will be working on in the near future? We’ll get to that later, first some background:
How we develop - SCRUM & Agile based
A leading principle in flexible software development (i.e. SCRUM, Agile), is that of ‘Minimum Viable Product’: release versions in an early stage when something works. Then you’ll learn 100 times more from real-life feedback than from trying to create ‘the perfect’ functionality from the get-go. Depending on the amount of feedback that we get, we will then continue to develop that functionality at a later stage.
Developments ‘under the hood’
However much we like to expand with cool new features, most of the ‘code’ of Viking relates to stuff that is just not so exciting for our end users. But it’s incredibly important, just ‘invisible’ and it requires effort to maintain: database integrity, security, code optimizations - this is what you rely on every day, probably without being aware of it. This is what keeps Viking reliable and future-proof.
The reality of software development
The path from ‘nice idea’ to a stable, functional release, is often underestimated severely. To give you an impression, even for seemingly ‘small’ changes, the following process has to be followed to guarantee good compatibility:
Nice idea >> translation to sensible functional requirements by us >> technical input from multiple developers and UI designers >> go/no-go >> the actual coding by devs >> push to our testing environment >> functional testing and first feedback round >> improving the code >> more testing and second feedback round >> push to live systems (you receive the update) >> monitor the release with Hangover, an application that immediately notifies us of errors in live systems to be ahead of issues >> possibly final quick-fixes >> stable release and happy users
Still with us :) ?
All of this is a real necessity, because creating good software simply doesn’t magically happen by itself.
So, how do we determine the roadmap?
We mainly work with our yearly survey that is sent out in the European winter. The main direction is plotted there. How do we decide what to put on the roadmap? That depends on several factors:
- What is the impact of the feature? If it helps save time and money on a day-to-day basis, it is more important than a feature that you only need once a month.
- Number of requests. If 50 customers ask for a feature, it is more important than a feature only 2 customers asked for.
- The Viking vision. Some features help us. For example, we get less support, or we can use that feature in our marketing efforts.
- Time versus benefit of the feature. Developing software is a very unpredictable process: something that seems simple can take more than six weeks, something that seems complex is sometimes ready in two weeks.
- Multiple other reasons: Changes by law (GDPR), stability, safety, development of the market, external parties, etc.
Why don’t we share our roadmap?
Presenting our roadmap to our users would create a false expectation that we can stick to that roadmap. We want to stay flexible. Something that seemed easy, can be very hard to develop. Something that now seems impossible can turn out to be much easier after a night's sleep. And something that did not seem that important, might get priority after support insights. So it regularly happens that a project that is really up next time is pushed back several times because more important projects come in between.
How to influence our roadmap
The main thing you can do is fill out the yearly survey (sent out to you in the European winter). During the year, write down all your feedback and send it to us in that survey. There are 2 types of feedback we ask for in the survey:
1. Quick fixes
These are often developments that take less than 1 hour to develop. These so-called ‘quick fixes’ make the software more intuitive to use.
2. Bigger feature updates
What are the main features that you want to see added and/ or reworked?
How much influence do I have?
All our customers together have a lot of influence on our roadmap. By listening to our customers and actively asking for feedback in the yearly survey, we get a very good picture of what our customers need.
On the other hand, as an individual customer you have little influence. You have to rely on other users who run into similar problems and bring it up to us so that it gets on our radar.
Practice shows that the masses ensure that the important problems automatically surface in our minds. Rarely does an individual customer come up with a groundbreaking insight for a new feature that we didn't already hear from 10 other customers or came up with ourselves.
Is there a way to speed up development for important features to me?
If something is really important to you and you would like to have it developed now, you can request custom development. Because we don’t do private development, your request has to fit in the Viking vision and benefit the system for multiple users. If your request fits, we will send you an estimate on the number of hours we think we need to develop this. If you agree to this, we will put it on the roadmap with appropriate priority. Once developed, it will be available in the Viking system to you and other users.