User Personas and User Stories

[The Q]

First, thank you for your input.  Together we can help make tools to better our community.  To start we need to understand the variety and diversity of our community and the various problems we need to solve.  Please add comments to this thread in the Personas/User Stories format.

• "As someone looking for code I want to..."
• "As someone contributing code I want to..."
• "As a user collaborating on an idea for un-created code, I want to..."
• "As a potential developer of code that hasn't been created yet, I want to..."
• "As a co-developer of code I want to..."
• "As a user of code that already exists I want to be able to..."
• "As a GCentral community member seeking to establish credibility I want to..."
• "As a company using GCentral as infrastructure..."

You can start with one of these or start with your own but please continue the statement with what you want to do.  Use these examples for ideas.

• As a Developer I want to be able to find code that will best help me create solution to...
• As a contributor I want to be able to share my library and distribute it easily through GPM, NIPM, or VIPM as a G Package, NI Package, or VI Package.
• As a user of Open Source Code I want to be able to find and download libraries from GPM, NIPM, and/or VIPM, easily.
• As a GCentral user I want a single profile that describes my work in the G Community (a digital code "resume/CV").
• As a GCentral User, I want a history of packages I've downloaded.

Thank you.

 

Sincerely,

Quentin "Q" Alldredge

Member of the Board of Directors, GCentral

[Stagg54]

As a community member and package consumer I want to support your efforts.

[Stagg54]

As a company that uses LabVIEW and has it's own existing internal repository for reuse code, I would like a way for my developers to discover packages in G Central and in our private reuse repository, all from a single portal.

[Porter]

As someone contributing code on LAVA, I would like to see the certified LAVA repository packages made available through the GCentral package search tool.

[Stagg54]

As a package consumer I would like to be able to subscribe to packages so that I get notified when a new version is available.

[Chris Cilino]

As a participant in the G package community I would like a periodic manifest of all new packages so I can stay up to date on what's new. I want to be able to specify how often I get the manifest and the maximum number of packages listed in the manifest.

[The Q]

As an IDE add on tools developer I want to publish, distribute, and install the tools as packages. 

[The Q]

As a developer that works in development environment that is not internet connected I need to be able to host and search an internal system. 

[The Q]

As a developer that works in development environment that is not internet connected I would like to be able to download packages and put them in a local repository.

[Christian Butcher]

As a developer working on multiple machines, I'd like to be able to save a (personal) configuration file of "IDE-improvement" style packages to install on every machine.

[Christian Butcher]

As a user with a CI-system based on building my packages, I want to be able to programmatically update the package version on GCentral (or notify of a new package, or however this might work).
This might involve something like a POST request.

[PA-Paul]

As a developer using open source code, I want to be able to inspect and run the unit tests/verification steps etc that were used to prove the code works as intended before release. 

[Christian Butcher]

On 10/4/2019 at 4:20 PM, PA-Paul said:

As a developer using open source code, I want to be able to inspect and run the unit tests/verification steps etc that were used to prove the code works as intended before release. 

Relating to this, as a developer who might use open source code, I would like to be able to avoid installing (potentially obscure) test frameworks and similar to test code that I for whatever reason (author, company, etc) implicitly trust.
I suspect this has a lot more to do with the packaging chosen though, and may not be easily manipulated by GCentral...

[Christian Butcher]

KJK@GPower reports on the NI Forums (link unavailable without tech preview, but posting here because largely unrelated to tech preview and so perhaps not covered by non-disclosure?) that:
"I know that the GCentral will be the place to go for finding reuse code what I'm not sure about is if there will be an active forum where [users] can get help and support from the G-Community."

So perhaps:
As a user of GCentral, I (might, if I were KJK@GPower, or the person they responded to) want to discuss using a package with the creator of that package (and/or other users) via a discussion page or forum system.

[Chris Cilino]

As a member of the LabVIEW community I would like to have only one profile so I can have a consolidated summary of my activity in the community (number of ni.com posts, number of packages I've created, average rating on the software I release, etc)

[Stagg54]

As a package creator I would like to be able to see how many people have downloaded my package.

[jacobson]

As a contributor to other packages I would like acknowledgement for those contributions.

This was from our user group and the general idea was that package owners can build a self-brand of sorts by being attached to popular packages but if someone makes significant contributions to many successful packages there should be some sort of recognition. I think the OpenG libraries are a good example where there may only be one owner but I'm sure there were some large contributions from several people that led to the overall success of the project. I don't know the best way to do this but the simplest might be to have a list of projects that you are a major or minor contributor to. You might be regarded as a minor contributor for any packages which you submit any meaningful code (some bug fix or new feature) while being a major contributor might be an acknowledgement from the package owner. In my mind a package may have a field for major contributors and the package owner could curate that list and link to other users.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 11/8/2019 at 9:12 PM, jacobson said:

As a contributor to other packages I would like acknowledgement for those contributions.

This was from our user group and the general idea was that package owners can build a self-brand of sorts by being attached to popular packages but if someone makes significant contributions to many successful packages there should be some sort of recognition. I think the OpenG libraries are a good example where there may only be one owner but I'm sure there were some large contributions from several people that led to the overall success of the project. I don't know the best way to do this but the simplest might be to have a list of projects that you are a major or minor contributor to. You might be regarded as a minor contributor for any packages which you submit any meaningful code (some bug fix or new feature) while being a major contributor might be an acknowledgement from the package owner. In my mind a package may have a field for major contributors and the package owner could curate that list and link to other users.

In the case of the libraries that I contributed to OpenG, I tried to add all the names to the copyright notice who provided more than a trivial bug fix. I also happened to add my name to a few VIs in other OpenG packages when I felt it was more than a trivial bug fix.

[joerghampel]

As a community member just wanting to drop my thoughts and ideas for further discussion, I want to give my feedback in a more colloquial way (hence I created this thread).

[ChrisStrykesAgain]

As a user collaborating on an idea for un-created code, I want to be able to see what other users are thinking about as well.

For example, let's say, in the back of my mind, I have this idea for an open source barbecue thermometer that runs on a Raspberry Pi using LabVIEW. That said, I have several open source project ideas, all of which I find equally interesting, so I randomly pick one of them to start working on. But, maybe there's another community member that wants such a BBQ thermometer as well. If I knew that, I might choose to prioritize the project that someone else is interested in vs. another project that nobody (but me) cares about.

Similarly, let's say I have the idea, but don't have the bandwidth to really pull it off in any reasonable timeframe. Someone else sees the idea, however, and wants to help. Knowing that I'm not alone, I might choose to begin work on the idea.

Finally, let's say that I have this really cool idea, but I'm a software guy and it would probably require a custom Pi HAT. That's way outside my comfort zone, but maybe someone else is willing to help with that, and make the project a reality.

This could even allow for voting, similar to the kudos system on the NI Idea Exchange. Of course, there's no obligation to do anything if your idea gets a bunch of kudos, but it could be incentive and/or drive innovation by others.

[Chris Cilino]

Love this idea! So basically an "idea exchange". I have an idea!

1. Does the solution exist already?
2. Is anyone planning to create it?
3. Can I plan it in such a way that other's can implement it?
4. Can I start implementation so that other's can join in?

As a community member I would like answers to all of the above quickly. 

 

Is that a fair summary @ChrisStrykesAgain?

[jacobson]

@Chris Cilino I think having this sort of request area can also add motivation to polish up some existing work. I would guess there are a lot of unpolished libraries sitting in a lot of private repositories and having a few requests for that functionality might give more motivation to return to the project, polish it up a bit, and actually publish it.

[Chris Cilino]

Hey Ya'll

Just wanted to let you know we're tracking user stories at https://github.com/gcentral/Website/issues. Please feel free to submit issues there and continue the discussion on the user stories here.