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posted 12/17/06 by Anthony Governanti Behind the Curtain - Part 2

Ok, so we left off with our peek behind the curtain with the understanding that new features are chosen for a release with a method called Pairwise Comparison.

We also left with a question about how the features that are compared are actually chosen in the first place. Well that is where product management comes in. It's the job of Dave and Peter and the rest of the Product Management team to collect the requests of all our customers, sales staff, AEs, partners and resellers and start narrowing down themes and duplicates and to create a master list of requirements. This list becomes a document called the Product Requirements Documents, or the PRD (Yet another TLA). Early on in the product life, a lot of the features on this list were pretty obvious - we needed to get the core items in the product so we could have a product to work with, like points, surfaces, alignments, profiles etc. Now that Civil 3D is starting to mature, and more and more users are adopting it, we can start to narrow in on specific features that help round out the product, and get us closer to the nirvana of a truly "complete" solution. The problem is, that the closer to this we get, the more input there is from a wider audience, this job get more and more difficult.

So for each release cycle, there is a process of documenting what that release will focus on. The PRD is used as a framework and conduit for communicating the "themes" of features that will be added. Development then takes the PRD, and runs an analysis of the amount of effort needed to complete a feature (this is basically and estimate of man-hours it will take to write, test, and integrate the new code into the software). Once the estimates of effort are weighed against the business case for each feature (this is where your input is paramount; because we can't just say "this would be a wicked cool feature, let's do it", we have to map the need of the feature to solving a customer issue or making the product better for a customers need). This again is where hard decisions have to be made; it may come down to a situation where a feature is really needed, but it will take a lot of work to get it done; the team has to decide to either add that feature, and remove others from the list in order to do it, or not do it, and concentrate on other features (hope that makes sense).

I guess my whole point here is to show you that the decision making process that shapes Civil 3D is very important, but that it is also very complex. It takes a lot of dedicated folks and at times, very hard decisions are made. Just know that in the end, we here at Autodesk are trying to get you the best products on the market, with the highest quality, in the most timely manner we can. The next time you say to yourself "well any 'good' cad program should have that feature", stop to think about this process a little, and try to see the scale of a program like Civil 3D.

Next time for Behind the Curtain; we'll get a little closer to things that are near and dear to my heart; demonstrating Civil 3D.
Till next time,
Cheers,
AG

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