It sounds like you've got everything well in hand: you're asking the right questions, open to suggestions from your users, and willing to make whatever changes are required to your project. However, as far as "getting meaningful comments" from users I have this to say:

Users suck at testing and evaluating software.

It's been my experience that the user (and by "user" I mean "the target audience who will ultimately be using the widget in production") make really lousy testers. For the most part they don't know how to stress a program (making choices that the programmer didn't anticipate), or test outcomes (did the the program do what it was supposed to do?), or evaluate the program for completeness (is there something it should be doing and doesn't?) Doing these things takes a LOT of time, getting into a program, understanding what it does, working through scenarios, thinking through possibilities, etc. etc. This is a lot of work, and it takes a special kind of person with special kinds of skills from someone who is very meticulous and linear. In my experience very, very few people in the "user" category are like that, so although I do what you do and toss out new widgets for suggestions/evaluation/bugchecks I rarely get anything more useful than "Huh... looks like it works" which of course leaves the real "evaluation" to when the users are using it in production awhile, try to do X and find the program doesn't do X, or get irritated because function Y doesn't work, or works in a less than optimal way.

These days I still put out my programs for evaluation, but I realize that it's mostly just a formality, and that almost never will anyone spend the amount of time I need that would really be useful. The whole situation makes you very appreciative of the professional QA folks whose job it is to do what you want... it IS a real job, that most people simply don't have the skill or experience to do well.

So, well, good luck to you, but if I were you I wouldn't expect much. The good news is that with a development team of one it'll be relatively easy to make changes after the fact as time goes on after the widget is in production.

Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer

In reply to Re: How do I test a CGI program properly? by Trimbach
in thread How do I test a CGI program properly? by ajt

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