I don’t agree with how Servoy moderates on their forum*
Published by admin on Thursday, February 4, 2010 - 03:50:50 - Filed under General, News
I didn’t write here for a while and I apologize: I have been so much occupied improving/fixing/documenting/testing/polishing my Browser Suite that I didn’t find the time and energy to write about it lately.
Still I’m here and I keep working on Servoy during the day, and doing my bit for the community during the evening (should I say the night?). And I keep looking in the Servoy forum for bits and pieces, tips and tricks, news and discussions.
Today I have read a post from David Workman from Data Mosaic, which was raising some serious questions and expressing some concerns about the state of the Servoy community and the attitude of Servoy towards it, with some sort of statistical proof to it. I thought that some of his points were fair enough and I was interesting in following this thread to learn what Servoy and other fellow developers would have to say in reaction to it.
So I was but little abashed to see that this post just simply disappeared!
I know this is not the first time, but it really annoys me to see that valid concerns from a developer who invested so much in Servoy and its community for years (indeed, he created a whole business aroung it!) would simply be dismissed in such a way. IMHO it just proves how valid some of David concerns can be related to Servoy management attitude towards us developers who are trying to work as partners with them.
So I decided to reproduce it here in full (thanks to google cache). I will simply say that I don’t always agree with David - especially when it comes to Mac and Java ;-) - but I think he expresses here some valid points that should not just disappear, so here it is - as it was written:
“Servoy is screwing itself with its approach to the Servoy community — and it is the most important factor limiting the growth of Servoy. It also translates into various misunderstandings and disconnects at a fundamental level. My analysis so far:
The positives
- webinars: some of these have been nothing short of brilliant
- forum
- access: we’re all sitting here hashing things out. servoy president, chief of mac haters, and me. pretty cool considering i’m sitting in my underwear right now. actually, just very cool. thx.
The negatives:
- historically bad documentation. it has currently risen to the almost adequate level due to the near mutiny of servoy developers last year
- small collection of examples and most of them sub par. none of them make you go “wow”! have you seen what other tools are doing these days?
- monetizing VUG hosting ($1,500 a shot) that me and other developers spent a ton of hours building up an audience for
- meaningless SAN program. should be merit based. like to be a partner you have to contribute to the servoy community or something intelligent like that
- lack of training. especially at the entry level for new people picking servoy up
- no easy way to sell servoy modules/solutions. as far as i know, we’re the only ones who have figured out how to obfuscate so we can release tons of code to testers and clients while reasonably protecting our investment
- closed bug system. no voting, no commenting, no what is happening, no transparency. it screams that you are in control. we’re you’re developers, you’re just 5 guys and a windmill if i recall correctly. we demand transparency. in return, i promise to submit a gazillion bug reports to you, work with other developers to confirm their existence, and spend hours creating test solutions for you to debug
- lack of focus on simplifying developing applications in Servoy. each iteration of servoy should have a focus on making our lives easier. figuring everything out on our own and bug testing supposedly production versions does not fall in this category
- too many features coming out in production versions badly and/or partially implemented with little to zero explanation on how to use, why to use, what the hell it’s even doing there, and best of all — the occasional why didn’t i know about this a year ago when it was implemented?
- no community manager or developer advocate
- buy all your developers macs. well…ok…i had to try
- no community manager or developer advocate. repeating because this really is my last item — and i believe it is super important
The results:
About a year ago you mentioned to me that Servoy had reached the 300,000 client mark. Seeing as how we want to sell a comprehensive frameworks to Servoy developers my very first thought was, how many Servoy developers does this translate into? My subjective opinion at the time was not very many.
So for about 9 months now I have been forum scraping. Neat little solution written in Servoy of course. Tracks how many new members, when the last time someone logged in, and the last time someone posted anything. Since the Servoy forum is the only place where Servoy developers hang out, I think it’s a fairly solid indicator of Servoy developer activity. Not completely accurate as far as raw numbers goes, but the trends these numbers reveal are quite likely spot on.
These numbers tell an interesting story. Out of 1,631 forum members (as of January 30, 2010), about 400 are currently active in the last 3 months. This is about the same number that were active when Servoy 4 was released a year and a half ago. Again, the raw total of 400 may be a bit off (I don’t have the statistical chops to figure out the mean variation) but the fact that the number is the same for the last year and a half time span is a solid statistic.
For a product as great and as mature as Servoy, my take on the numbers is that they translate into a pretty solid failure in reaching out to developers. It’s a pretty low number of total active developers and the flat net growth activity rate the past year and a half is not a good future indicator.
I place the blame primarily on Servoy’s lack of community engagement, secondarily on rolling out too many features in less than polished state, and thirdly on Servoy’s inelegant switch to Eclipse. The end result is a bunch of added pain points to long time Servoy developers and a product that is much harder to use and grasp for first time developers.
I think Servoy should have a goal of 1,000 active community members by the end of 2010. Basically doubling your performance in one year what you’ve done since you first launched 6-7 years ago. I believe it’s totally doable — but not with the mindset and attitudes Servoy is currently operating with.
Compared to what other companies are doing, I seriously don’t see how Servoy plans to remain viable in the long term without being completely dedicated, single-minded and aggressive in this area. Community development is the new marketing and Servoy is obviously completely blind to this fact. Which puts you several years behind the game as it is being played now.
And this completely sucks because the health of my company is entirely dependent on the health of Servoy. So my options are to try and get you guys to figure a few things out, bring another technology or two on board, or both.
This is me trying the first option out.
Wed Feb 03, 2010 9:15 am.
David Workman
Data Mosaic”
To the ‘no community engagement’ Johan Compagner reacted (but I have no permission of his or Servoy to reproduce his statement). Basically he said he was one of the top poster on the forum, which is true and, as someone else said later, very much appreciated.
I will only add to that, as I have already done in the past, that maybe if the docs and samples were clear enough he would spend less time to answer the same newbie questions again and again, and a lot more time to develop and stabilize things in Servoy code (on Mac or Win 7 - whichever he chooses ;-)
I will leave open the comments for this post (even if I know that I will have to delete spam daily) to allow anyone (including Servoy staff) to express his thoughts and reactions here when they couldn’t do it there…
I promise I won’t delete any comments - apart from porn adds ;-)
