Progress Update: Getting Ready for Delivery
This is the first progress update we’ve had since our invitation Beta in January, and our baby’s almost ready. Richard, Marcin and myself met on the weekend in Amsterdam to go over some final issues and Marcin and I are in the production office in Krakow this week to implement the last changes before launch.
It was important to make the definitive list of features and functionalities and set the hard date for launch. We’ve gone through so many revisions, changes, and reorganizations in the last few months that we had almost lost sight of one of the most important things: actually going live!
From labor pains…
If we had the time, I know we could spend another half-year redeveloping, testing and fine-tuning the system and design. But like Richard said, after nine months, everyone just wants the baby out! That’s where we are now. If we continue internal development we’ll lose the sense of urgency that has driven us since the summer and the project risks to become an academic exercise.
Making changes at this point is somewhat challenging from a production perspective because people have vested interests in their design elements or their coding. No one wants to do any kind of disruptive change now but we’re got to keep that flexibility current—everyone needs to understand that Respectance will be under constant development for the life of the product. Changes are healthy; they always need to be seen as “improvements”. Marcin told me yesterday that in the code repository, hardly anything is more than 3 months old—indicating that the system is constantly renewing itself.
The most important thing now is to get real users and their feedback. Development will continue for the life of Respectance, but the time has come that the users direct it, rather than us. It’s also important to us, as the developers, that the system goes live because we sometimes forget that there’s a greater purpose behind all this. It’s not just about creating a cool application; it’s about building a service that really helps people—right now, we’re cut off from those people.
…to first day of school
Now it’s time for us to start reaching out to others. We need fresh contributions to help us take Respectance beyond our original ideas. The input of new people and the feedback of real users will help make the project more robust and more relevant. Sending your child off to school that first day must be a scary thing, but the experiences and relationships he or she will have there will be invaluable in their development. That’s where we are at now with Respectance and that first day is fast approaching. We’ve all got the feeling that our child is going to do okay in the big world.
27 Feb
