Of projects, plans and juice

Sometimes the truth can be hard. Especially if things don't work out as planned. I hate to miss a deadline. But sometimes you just can't have your cake and eat it, too.

What happened?

Actually we intended to have SilverCart 1.2 ready and released in August. You don't have to be a genius to figure out that there are not much days left in August an that it might be hard to deliver the release on time.

Why?

Without external funding, we need to rely on projects to keep the juice flowing. Right now we have one project finished this week (Houte couture anyone? DirndlLand has the finest handmade hats for Dirndls) and 2 more projects with deadlines due in the very near future.

So much for the "bad" news. The good news is that we managed to develop more and better features than we have originally planned to put into the next release, once we get it shipped. At least some kind of equilibrium.

Now what?

We have learned our lesson. Mostly...maybe. We still want to stick to a roadmap, but we won't have the features engraved in stone.

That means, while we still want to publish new releases on a monthly or bi-monthly base, will be more flexible when it comes to the features that will find their way into the following releases. We'll talk about what's cooking, so you'll know what might be on the plate once the dinner release is served.

But there will be no guarantee because we just can't have that monkey on our backs no more.

What do you think? Would you rather have fixed dates with a varying feature set or would you prefer a fixed feature set with variable dates?