User:Keegan (WMF)/Agreement3

Currently, community members generally provide product feedback, if applicable, when either feedback is requested or when the community member uses a product and finds a bug or missing feature. Wikimedia projects are volunteer-driven with a limited pool of people interested in testing software, so the latter scenario - use of the product in production - is when the most feedback is given. Despite the value of early feedback, product teams should expect to receive the most response when a product goes live, and not as much as could be beneficial during the development stages.

The feedback that will be given is often very non-technical, and familiarity with how Wikimedians explain their workflow as compared to how developers explain workflow is helpful. The primary aim of a contributor is to build and curate content for Wikimedia sites, any time spent on bug reporting and product feedback takes away from that time. It is helpful if responses from product teams to feedback from community members help the community member clarify their point quickly and easily, with information being more important than the argument.

Summary: Generally speaking, Wikimedians are not interested in testing software and most communication with a development team comes when a bug or missing/underdeveloped feature is discovered after deployment into production. Since most users are non-technical, feedback on software will often need to be parsed to find the issue needing resolved, and it's helpful to communicate back to community members in equally non-technical terms.