Revit Dogfooding exercises?

[Anonymous]

Does the Revit team do dogfooding exercises? (using their own products to do an architectural project)

I suggest that it should do this exercise, so that it can find out what users are missing in every project. Perhaps then we would be able to tag elements in legends and dimension them. There are many other things that any user would want  to do in every project.

At the moment, it seems like Autodesk is just thronging features at customers without a real understanding of how we use the product. Simply using the product would give Autodesk a lot of insight as to the capabilities and missed opportunities of the product.

[loboarch]

The team does engage in production exercises regularly during the release cycle. There are also regular feedback sessions with users during feature development.

If you want to be involved, you can sign up for our Beta program and test our preview releases each  month. In many cases customers from our beta program are invited to act as customer consultants on small development teams working on specific features. We would love to have you participate and give us regular feedback.

https://feedback.autodesk.com/welcome/

[Anonymous]

Hi @loboarch I'm part of a fw BETA programs and I give a lot of Revit Ideas, however there is a generalized frustrations among users that the Revit ideas are not being implemented or listened to.

Regarding my questions about dog fooding. It seems like there have been no exercises that went far enough in these categories:

• Revit massing and adaptive panels - Have you designed a full building with massing and adptive panels in a dog fooding exercise? It seems like you wold`ve identified the many many bugs that are in that system and make it incomplete.
• Revit Legends - Whenever we teach people about Revit, we have to explain all the limitation of legends. It seems obvious to any architects that the system is broken and we have to shamefully explain why it is like that and not fixed every year.
• Revit MEP Phases - Have you done a a project that uses a Revit MEP link with phases? Revit MEP projects don't support phases and this is a HUGE limitation for big projects. I can't believe anyone would have done a dogfooding exercise of a real project (with phases and linked models) and not notice the limitations of the software and asked to make some changes
• Landscaping tools are absolutely horrendous, any dogfooding exercise or stroll in the forums would've shown that

The other thing is that all of these problems are already documented in Revit Ideas forums, but Autodesk is not listening to us. Some of these problems can only be understood by experienced users, so they don't get many votes. Still, many popular ideas are ignored by Autodesk in the Ideas forum.

I've been with Revit since 2010, I just want to make sure these things are solved sooner than later. The fundamental problem here is getting Autodesk to listen to us when we have major problems.

[RobDraw]

The problem with IDEAS are that a lot of them are not a problem with the program but rather an issue of the user not understanding what Revit wants. There is a huge divide between the way Revit works and the way some users think it should work. Those IDEAS won't be addressed by development.

Most of the time a user insists on a change in the program because of a particular problem, said user fails to find out how to make that particular problem work before relinquishing it to a fault in the program.

[Anonymous]

Agree, a lot of IDEAS are users who should be in the forums an these ideas should be identified as such.

Still, here is an example of a problem that Autodesk has been aware since 2010 that is still not solved

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/fix-topography-not-responding-to-phases-properly/idi-p/68...

At this point, the users have created an idea (more like identified a major bug) and voted for it. Really, Autodesk knows about it, but nothing is being done. Maybe my problem is not that ideas are not being accepted, but more that major bugs are not being solved.

The other problems is with specialized problems that 98% of users won't be aware of or understand the implications. These are hard to get votes on since they are only understood by experienced power users and don't get many votes. Here is an example:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/views-associated-with-view-templates-don-t-work-please-fi...

[RobDraw]

Thanks for proving my point.

Good luck!

[pieterschiettecatte]

Not sure what point is proven.

The two ideas listed as example above by @Anonymous  are both valid suggestions for improvements. Perhaps the title 'view templates don't work' should be changed to 'don't work as I'd expect them to', but the suggestion for improvement still stands. Same with topography: yes there are 'workarounds', but I think most people agree (or at least the people who voted on that idea) that the current system is inadequate/inconsistent. 

As for the original question: I've seen the development team go to great extents to verify whether new features meet expectations, but of course Revit is so huge, and there only so many developers...  The best thing you can do to help (I feel) is be active in the beta program, and in particular reporting bugs (with a clear repo case etc). 

[Anonymous]

@pieterschiettecatteI think the problem is with elements that have been left behind and not revisited rather than new feature.

The massing is a good example. I don't think there is active development on it, yet there are many broken aspects of it.

As for reporting bugs, I've reported a lot of these through the Autodesk support over 5 years ago. They told me that programmers would be told, but nothing has been done one it. While I have documented some of the major bugs, it is not getting much traction.

From what I see in the industry, Revit massing and adaptive panels are not very much used. I think this is mostly because this workflow is not well documented and buggy, so people just use Sketchup and rhino, which drives me crazy. So people just end up abandoning he workflow instead of working through it, which I can understand with all the bugs and limitations. I just wish we could put this tool up to standards, but it's really hard to get traction from users who don't know the tool.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/revisit-massing-and-panel-tools-give-them-some-love/idi-p...

[RobDraw]

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@pieterschiettecatte wrote:

The two ideas listed as example above by @Anonymous  are both valid suggestions for improvements.

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That's a matter of opinion.

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@pieterschiettecatte wrote:

Perhaps the title 'view templates don't work' should be changed to 'don't work as I'd expect them to', but the suggestion for improvement still stands.

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Not when you consider that the tool in question actually states that it is "applied to new views".

As to the other IDEA, there are a lot of misconceptions when it comes to phasing in Revit and people are VERY opinionated about how it "should" work and refuse to accept the way that it does work.

I'm not going to argue about this in the context of this thread as it won't take long for insults and personal attacks to come around from those that think their way is the way it should work.

Good luck!

[Anonymous]

There are issues that have been brought up to the developers, in person, at the factory but still have not been implemented...and it has been years and years.

I've had a few chances to attend one of these events, but I got shot down by management to attend.

[RobDraw]

I think that a lot of the people who have or support some IDEAS that "seem very easy to implement" don't realize that the implementation of them may have unexpected consequences that could be very detrimental to the program.