Ever wonder what happens when you submit a feature request?
Rain or shine, holidays or term time, the Hero development team fires full steam ahead: reviewing requests from Heroes in schools, actioning new projects, and catching up on general housekeeping - all to enhance your user experience.
Many minds make Heroic software!
In a similar regard to, “It takes a village to raise a child”, collaboration is a fundamental part of software development. Many minds have contributed to the growth and evolution of Hero. We take great pride in knowing that Hero is equipped with features designed by former educators and school support staff to see you succeed. But, it doesn’t stop there!
We value your input
Our users are at the heart of what we do. As such, fostering collaboration with our Heroes in schools helps determine where we place our time and energy in terms of feature development. We take every request into consideration, as a way to inform future decisions regarding the direction of Hero’s growth.
Though we would love to deliver upon each request we receive, our philosophy is to choose deliberately, and get it right - without over complicating. Hero is built to be as comprehensive as possible, without compromising on our vision to provide a software that is simple and intuitive. It’s a fine balancing act!
To ensure success, the development team has thorough systems and processes in place when building all new features and updates. The chronology below follows the journey of a request, through to its Heroic release. We have used the analogy of a child moving through the schooling system, as demonstrated on our development process web page, as a helpful point of reference:
Birth
A request is born when one of our users or a member of our internal team creates a new ticket, detailing a feature request.
Early Childhood
In this stage, the request is waiting to start their schooling and to be prioritised. Our team meets weekly to discuss all requests to be actioned, and agree on which ones should take priority.
Prioritisation takes in a number of factors, including but not limited to:
Popularity of the feature request
The impact the feature will have on all of our users
Time sensitivity
Feasibility/complexity of the feature
Whether it aligns with our vision for the software
Starting School
The qualifying feature requests are chosen, and each feature is fully scoped by the development team to determine how it will function. Features are then scheduled for development.
Learning & Progressing
At this stage, our development team are actively working on writing the code.
Peer Review
Our developers review each other's code and check that it is ready to be tested.
Testing
New features undergo extensive testing to ensure that they function as they should, and don’t disrupt the other great features of Hero. This is carried out by both technical team members, as well as our wider team (including our Education and Administration consultants), who can test and provide feedback from a user perspective.
Graduation
The graduation process is where we produce the documentation that goes alongside new feature releases - from help articles, to updating of user guides, and creating action plans. Our users are then notified of the new release via the Flame in their Hero site.
Release
The new feature is then released live, to you, our Heroic users!
Though our development team are our quiet Heroes, they work continuously to monitor, update and refine the many features of Hero - ensuring that the software is running as optimally as possible for our users. Without them, Hero would be but a distant dream!
We hope that this has provided some insight into the Heroic work that goes on behind the scenes. We love hearing from our users, and this continues to support the ongoing enhancements to our heroic platform.