How do you get feedback on your projects? Do you do exhaustive user-testing before releasing a project to market, or trust your gut that you know you’ve made the right decisions? How does fear of losing your I.P. influence your decisions?

At MIX Online, we’re able to be very open about our development process—we talk about new projects as we build them, for example, and try to get our work into users' hands as early as possible. We make concerted efforts to be transparent, because we find it makes our projects and products stronger in the end.

Of course, not all teams can be as open—but they can take baby steps in the right direction. Here are few suggestions for becoming more transparent about the development of your projects:

Blog and Use Social Networking

Set up a site and blog

It's so easy to register a domain and set up a site, there’s almost no excuse not to. Set up a site for your upcoming project, complete with details of what the world can expect when you launch. Allow users to leave comments and sign up for updates and user-testing. This is a great way to ensure that you have people ready to help test.

Twitter

Set up a Twitter account and follow people in your project's realm of influence. Tell people what you’re doing and ask them for feedback and ideas. You'll likely get input that will help you scope and generate interest for your project, even before you've released it.

Post images

Words are great, but sometimes images of wireframes, comps, explorations, etc. are better. Let people *see* what you’re doing. Even static images posted to Flickr can be helpful.

Engage your potential audience

Request detailed feedback and converse with people who provide it. Be sure to monitor comments on your blog and Twitter—and then be sure to respond. There’s nothing worse than taking time to write a thoughtful comment and have it just disappear into the ether.

Publish early and often

Get software into your users' hands as early as you can. This might mean getting a few people involved at first and widening the circle as the project progresses. Regardless, early brainstorming and testing will ensure that your project is actually useable. It’s easy for software creators to navigate a complicated system that they, themselves have created—not necessarily so for the actual user.

Publishing early also means doing shorter sprints and scoping your project down into manageable bits. This gives you more flexibility to add or remove features, change UX/UI, and make other adjustments as you receive real-world feedback.

Take advantage of systems like ClickOnce, which let you update your software as you roll out new features—so one buggy, unnecessary feature won't hold up a whole publication schedule. Save that buggy feature for later and update the software when the problem is solved.

Open-source

At Mix, we're able to post all our code to Codeplex and invite community involvement in our software development projects. Time and time again, we've found that releasing our projects to talented developers outside Microsoft and getting feedback from the community helps us develop a better product.

Of course, it’s hard to open-source every project, especially those that need monetization. If this is the case, you might be able to open-source *parts* of the project or open your code to a restricted set of developers and users.

Can’t do it all? Maybe you can do some …

If intellectual property is a concern, I realize it may be hard to follow the suggestions above. But for those who can afford to speak openly about their projects and who can get a small group of users to help test the application in the "real world," the project is destined to be better. We’ve all heard of “groupthink .” If N.A.S.A. can succumb to it at times, I think we can, too.

How do you get feedback on your projects? Do you do exhaustive user-testing before releasing a project to market, or trust your gut that you know you’ve made the right decisions? How does fear of losing your I.P. influence your decisions? Let us know by leaving a comment and be sure to follow us on Twitter @mixonline.