Chris Cyvas

I am sure this is going to sound ignorant, but, like other times, I’d ask you to take a closer look.

You see, I was sitting in a meeting today and we were discussing the business advantages of agile. Read that again. Not the development advantages, but the business advantages. And the conversation was not that deliberate, but that was what was happening. As I listened to the things the clients liked:

• Support for shifting priorities.
• Support for fail fast.
• Faster time to market.

I realized that these are the things that are in every small development shop that is forced to live to the whims of their clients. We’ve all either had those jobs, or those bosses that screamed like Chicken Little when the client stubbed her toe. But what I found so interesting is that agile appeared to be nothing more than the codification of that frenetic process. And I wonder if that isn’t the key to it’s success?

It’s the exact same negotiation, but slowed down for people that can’t, don’t, or shouldn’t change direction quickly.

Or is this completely obvious to everyone else and I’m just now getting it?

Mark my words, the next 10 years of software development is going to bring the Rise of the UI. I just wanted to be the first to say it . . . that I know of.

I’ve been pretty quiet lately. The jump from 2 kids to 3 is significant. For those of you with 2 kids thinking about 3 … let me pass on a little advice I received from my brother years ago:

“One is difficult because of the adjustment. Two is easier because they play together. Three is hectic, but four is absolute, f@#%ing chaos.”

I have found this advice to be pretty accurate. But I’m not going for 4 – that’s insanity!

There has been some good to come of the break I’ve taken though. I’ve been trying to figure out what has made dashCommerce so successful? This is not me being arrogant or all “check me out” – I am trying to figure out what the secret sauce is. By every measurable statistic I can put my fingers on, dashCommerce has become a great success and it’s moving even stronger than it has in the past. As I’ve mentioned before, there have been some good numbers from PayPal and I think the localization strategy has been well received. Also, we have more vendors over at dashCommerce.com offering up more providers – which confirms  that there is buy-in from the community for what we are delivering. There is value there for people.

Over the last two months I have been busy, just not much in the forums and I haven’t blogged in quite some time, but I have been working on things behind the scenes. Some has been overt – bug fixes and such into the main code branch, other work has been less obvious – check out my previous blog post. But I have been trying to take a hard look at what about dashCommerce has been successful, what hasn’t been successful, and where can I find the metrics to support my thoughts? I was checking out the international forums at dashCommerce.org – I usually don’t scroll this low in the screen – but I saw that we were approaching 20,000 registered users in the forums. I looked at that number in a generally unimpressed fashion, because, I figured, that it probably had always been around there. I couldn’t have been more wrong. You see, a lot of my impressions come from the “velocity of the forums”. There has been great satisfaction watching the forums die on Friday and come back to life Sunday evening / afternoon. Why? Because that tells me that, generally, people are not spending their weekend’s trying to get stuff to work. They are off enjoying their weekend! But the “velocity of the forums” does relate the frequency of questions and such. I was basing my impression on the feelings I had about that velocity.

But back to that 20,000 number … I got curious about that number as time went on, so I took a look at some of the other open source projects in the .NET space that have been around for a while, and what I found was that dashCommerce may be one of the most successful open source application projects in the .NET space. I was not prepared for that. The only one I could find that was bigger was DotNetNuke. Now, I am going based on forum membership only. Not exactly a great metric, but it does give you some insight.  So I dug a little deeper to see what the forum membership was when I took over the project in early 2007: 2,000 forum users – give or take a few, depending on what date you use. That means we have seen 20,000 users sign up since February 11, 2008. In 9 months we have signed up over 10X the amount of users as the CSK had in it’s entire history. That’s an impressive statistic, and one that I was entirely unprepared for.

So, I guess what I would like to know is – what do you like about dashCommerce? Why do you think it has been this successful? I really would like to hear from you because I would like to understand this better.

Thanks to everyone for making this such a success! (And a Special Thank You to Yitzchok and Naz!)

My wife and I are expecting our 3rd child (gulp!) any day now so I am going to be going dark for a few weeks. I’ll be around, and tending to administrative things, but I won’t be on the forums too much. Hopefully, when I get back, I’ll have some cool things to show for my absence.

As always, if you find a bug, please log it at CodePlex and if you have any feature requests, log them at CodePlex as well. And, if you have any patches, upload them to CodePlex. For more information on this just check out the FAQ under Learn More.

Naz and Yitzchok, I expect, will be around, but should they not be, just help each other out as best as you can.

We are pushing a 3.0.1 Release today that has a few enhancements and, more importantly, for the developers out there, there is a streamlined IPaymentProvider interface. There are some bug fixes as well and a few other tidbits here and there that are fixed up.

As always, a BIG THANKS to Yitzchok and Naz for their help! In addition, we are getting some good patches submitted to the project and that makes things considerably better.

From here on out, the releases will be more spread out and more substantial, but this release puts us on solid ground.

The dashCommerce Community has been great - you folks are being helpful and offering up patches, suggestions, and all the good stuff that makes running a project like this a little easier and less work. Thanks for that - it means a great deal to all of us that deal with the project on a daily basis.

Now go sell stuff!