Five weeks left. Flipping? Who's flipping? Kidding, I mean I'm as calm as one can be in this situation. Anyone would be stressed with this much time left in their first big project. Controls are being completed, pages are coming together, consultants are doing their thing. Am I concerned about everything getting done? November 1st is the day we're scheduled to go alpha, I'm not saying when we're going into prod. Because I'm not even letting MYSELF think about it. As far as I'm concerned production is November 1st. Don't even think that I'm not going to be asking some of you to help me test, lol, because I will be.
Right now I'm wiring up some of the xhtml, I'm going to be just plowing through things (hopefully) the next few weeks. This post is going to be short, tonight a girlfriend and I are getting together and having a bottle of wine and I'm taking a night off. However, I have one question for all of you. I know that a lot of people that read my page have been here before, is there any kind of advice, or wisdom you can pass on to someone that's in this spot of the life cycle for their first time? I'd love to be prepared for a major hiccup, though I”m sure there will be others.
Good night all, here's to the four day work week! (seriously, ever since I heard that's what they do at 37 signals, my boss is now the oracle)
Any good and well written software will have bugs (badly written code will have lots) so it is good to expect them. If you are going into alpha make sure to have as much trace logs switched on as possible (without compromising too much performance because it may also change the behavior of your app) and make sure to keep an eye on it as it is always good to know about a problem before the phones start ringing. So consequently you need to have a non-human feedback strategy in place, wherever you can get info about the app get it (event viewer, w3c logs custom traces).
ReplyDeleteIf you are giving the same attention to the alpha release as production, I trust that you�re already doing ok.
Sit back, relax and let it happen. If you have done your due diligence in testing (unit, functional etc.) there is nothing you should worry about. Things will break, unexpected things will happen. That's the way of computers... fun to work with but at the same time frustrating as all hell.
ReplyDelete@Craig and @Erick - Thanks for the encouragement, I did implement some exception logging, that should be helpful.
ReplyDelete