by Joel Spolsky on his well-known Joel on Software
First of all, he pointed out two things you have to avoid.
Number one. If you ever find yourself implementing a feature simply because it has been promised to one customer, RED DANGER LIGHTS should be going off in your head. If you're doing things for one customer, you've either got a loose cannon sales person, or you're slipping dangerously down the slope towards consultingware.
Number two, not to decide what features to implement. Don't do things just because they're inevitable. Inevitability is not a high enough bar.
Then, he presented a good way how to prioritize the tasks which he learned at the time during the planning Excel 5.0. Basically,
- List all the features;
- Vote on each feature by just a quick “thumbs up“ or “thumbs down“, and throw out all features that only have one or two votes;
- Assign cost for each of these features, on a scale of 1 to 10;
- Make a menu of all these features and their “costs“. Everybody on the team got a copy of the menu and was given $50 to play with. They could allocate their money any way they wanted, but they only had $50 to spend.
- Add up how much everyone spent on each feature;
- Divide the amount spent by the cost;
- Finally, sort by this number to find the most popular features.
Ha...quite amazing!
See the full article here