Enhancements and Code Changes

Requesting a Code Change

To request a code change or suggest an enhancement, click the "Fieldpine Account" icon on your reporting home page. In the secton "Your Tasks" click to add an item. Typically only a brief description is required at this stage.

Tick "Can be seen by other retailers" if you are more entering this as a suggestion generally (eg Please add interface to XYZ). We will take this as a signal that the request can be entered onto the public enhancement list.

You may edit priority/rank any time you wish as your needs change.

The task list should not be used for true support, we do not monitor it constantly, only as developer time becomes available.

When will it be completed?

• If you have paid for the enhancement request then delivery will be as per that agreement.
• If you are not paying for the enhancement then Fieldpine do not provide estimates of completion

Where Fieldpine are implementeing the change at our expense then the following is broadly the process used. This process can and does flex, it is provided as a guideline only so our process is somewhat transparent

• Fieldpine determine the value of this change against all the others we have, taking into account
• Posssible impact to other retailers
• Risk to existing retailers and potential support requirements
• Regulatory requirements
• Time to develop, test and document
• How quick is any possible workaround? If the change is to improve a process that takes 3 hours, that will have more weight than a process that takes 30 seconds. Of course taking into account frequency of use too. 3 hours once a year is less than 30 seconds used 20 times every day
• Are we already working in that code area, and can this be clipped onto that change without undue risk?
• What rank have you given this task, and how many votes have other retailers given it (where applicable). Any given retailer will often have a shopping list of changes and we look at the relative order you have assigned to the task. We look at the order of items, not the actual priority number. If you rank everything as "priority 1", then we ignore your ranking.
• How much revenue do you generate for Fieldpine? All customers of ours will receive free development time, however larger customers get a bigger time allocation
• How much time have you used already for support, emails, meetings or anything else that requires our time.
• Periodically, we have a "random day" and select items to implement almost at random. It tends to be smaller/safer requests that get selected for this.

The ultimate priority decision and delivery schedule is solely at Fieldpines discretion for unfunded change requests.

Why is it like this?

All software has a mountain of user requests for changes; but software companies have a finite amount of resource to address these changes. This means that requests must be prioritised.

In our case it is extremely difficult to prioritise some requests across our customer base. While you something might be critical to you, what order would you use for the following?

1. Implementing an EFTpos interface that will save some retailers on eftpos fees
2. Adding a new pricing scheme so that a special promo can be done
3. A change that would reduce support calls by N per month
4. Adding a new feature that would permit Fieldpine to grow our customer base by x%

Funded requests, where you pay to prioritise a change will typically move your request to the top of the queue (there are exceptions). This is a strong signal to us that this request is important to you. If a change is business critical to you, then it should be funded; but we will still implement it under the unfunded process. Funding a request can also allow us to expand the number of developers working on a task.

Fieldpine have many single store retailers where funding requests may be out of their reach, which is why we (unlike most companies) do maintain and work through lists for customers of all sizes.