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I'm curious to how others deal with upgrade lists and feature suggestions for developments (ie popular community driven websites)

At the moment, when a user makes a suggestions for an upgrade/feature, we stick it on an 'unscheduled' list to be reviewed in the future when we start setting out the next set of schedule.

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i would suggest Polling. And then deciding which one is most requested feature and what it takes to be done? – ElYusubov Jul 5 '12 at 14:46
Some really good respones. Any suggestions to dealing with a large backlog. – David Jul 6 '12 at 8:45

closed as not constructive by gnat, Walter, Jim G., Matthieu, Ryathal Aug 23 '12 at 17:22

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Depending upon the size and dedication of the team working on the project, your approach is reasonable enough.

The downside is that the requester doesn't have any feedback as to whether or not the suggestion will ever see the light of day.

If you have some tribal elders, it would be worth their applying a swag to priority and impact of the request before throwing it into the queue.
Another option would be to have regularly scheduled review (in Agile: grooming) sessions to review the requests and then prioritize them.

If you can, adding a quick stab at overall effort and a suggested approach can be handy. That makes it easier for less experienced team members to scroll through what's been requested and cherry pick what they think they can pick up.

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We use an agile methodology in which work items / change requests / new feature requests are put into a task backlog. Work is allocated within each monthly iteration and at the end of each iteration, tasks / new feature requests are reviewed in terms of their priority and are either included in the iteration to be implemented or kept in the task backlog.

Sometimes, if a feature request occurs during an iteration, it's added to the task list and implemented if it a priority. I think there are recommended practices when it comes to this but most teams appear to use variations of these and use the system that works best for them.

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Scrum would disallow adding any feature requests to the current iteration unless it is offset by removing equivalent work not yet started and it is accepted by the development team. Other iterative methodologies might allow adding new work within an iteration. – Matthew Flynn Jul 11 '12 at 16:25

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