Update 17 April 2017: We’d love to hear from you. Are we doing better? How can we make your developer experience the best ever? Share your thoughts in this short survey; we’ll use your responses to shape the work we do for you.
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Last year, we sent out a brief survey asking about your experience developing on the QuickBooks Online platform. Many of you took the time to answer (thank you!) and shared with us details about your likes, frustrations, and wish-lists to make your experience better. We followed up with many of you via email and phone calls to clarify and dive deeper into your concerns. While you praised our developer support and customer service, you found our documentation and tools lacking in a variety of areas, and asked for more sample code as well as faster turnaround on reported bugs.
Your feedback has directly shaped the work we’ve been doing to improve the platform and your developer experience. Although we know there’s plenty more to do, we’d love to know what you think of our progress so far.
Documentation improvements
Some of you had trouble finding information in the developer docs and found the docs generally hard to navigate, especially if you were new to the platform. You thought our OAuth documentation was hard to follow, the app publishing requirements were unclear, and the SDK docs were out of date. Highlights of the doc updates that we’ve made to address these concerns include:
- Revamped the overall doc architecture to simplify navigation
- Improved the QuickBooks Online Essentials guide, especially for first time users
- Improved the developer content for the Accounting API:
- Reorganized the Accounting API programming guide
- Revamped the Accounting dev guides as a series of tutorials headed by an App integration overview
- Improved docs for how to publish your app on QuickBooks Apps.com
- Made significant improvements to the SDK documentation
- Created new docs describing our support for Postman
Sample code
You told us our sample apps were too complicated and you want more sample code. We’ve since added lots of new sample code to our GitHub repository to make your development simpler. You can find out about the samples and navigate to them from our docs pages..
- New CRUD samples in Java, PHP, and .NET, publicly available on GitHub
- Detailed documentation for the samples also on GitHub
SDK improvements
You told us that our SDKs were hard to use and out of sync with the product releases. We’ve since done a lot of work to update the SDKs and have also made them available as open source.
- Regular updates and bug fixes for the Java, .NET, and PHP SDKs
- Revamped and expanded documentation for the SDKs
Other improvements
- Added support for Webhooks
- Continuing to address developer-reported bugs in the V3 APIs
- Launched improved marketplace for QuickBooks Desktop Apps
- Added support for Postman
Continued feedback
How have these improvements helped you? We’ll be sending out another brief survey in the coming days — we’d love to hear from you and look forward to your continued feedback!
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