Development of the completely new version of Stuffed Tracker took us almost 9 months. We re-wrote the software from ground up and in a different language (previous version was in Perl, the latest version is in PHP).
The final 2 months before the release was a constant race with time. Everyday during the course of these months it seemed to us that only several days are left before the release. But then new bugs were found and new important features were invented.
I personally have slept around 4-5 hours a day in the last 2 weeks before the release. I was preparing a Complete User Guide for the software. The final version of the Guide has more then 152,000 characters (with spaces) which is my new record for documents in any language (the Guide is in English).
As it turned out, writing complete documentation for a software product is a great way to actually test the software. I’ve found lots of new bugs while writing the Guide. I’ve also found inconsistencies in the interface and in some functionality, which we fixed of course before the release.
Soon, we should repeat this entire “launch nightmare” again with our project management software. I can’t say that I will be happy doing this again, but I definitely like the feeling of polish that Stuffed Tracker now has. I want to feel the same about Factory Nova.
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