As we dived into Beta 11, we realized it’s going to keep us occupied for a while! Since we approached the end of 2020, we made some adjustments to the project timeline. Moreover, we had a meeting to re-evaluate the pandemic situation to decide whether to start the public beta test in early 2021 or not. Therefore, I decided to update you on these matters.
Beta 11
The truth is we had heavily underestimated the amount of work and changes we need to do to meet Beta 11 requirements and achieve its objectives. We initially thought the Major Change we had planned to introduce would require something between 5% to 10% changes in our codebase. However, once we started, we quickly realized we are facing 20% to 30% changes. We are talking about a codebase with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. So even such a small difference will translate to many more weeks than our raw estimation.
Is this change worth its development time?
We’d like to think so. We believe it will drastically change the user experience of the apps. We also deem that no startup of our size in this stage goes under such heavy pressure. Still, we think it’s a right and essential move to robust the platform structure. Eventually, time can prove us to be wrong or right.
Estimations
Since I discussed this, I created the following model. It elaborates what we’re doing and have to deal with in different phases and how we make progress compared to what actually end-users (currently the private testers) see and probably what outsiders like you who are reading these updates might perceive of our progress:
As I illustrated above, no vertical advancements can be made without advancing horizontally on those beneath layers when it comes to real-world products.
Some people think tech startups figure out an unserved need and fulfill it with their software solution. In its essence, it is true, but it’s definitely an oversimplified representation of what they’re doing and what they have to deal with every day. I hope the above illustration helped you get a better understanding of the pain we endure 😅
Public Beta Testing
COVID-19 vaccination has been started. No news can be better than this in these ending days of doomed 2020. Still, most experts believe we would get back to semi-pre-COVID-19 time by the end of summer since vaccination can take time, and there might be some resistance at least in the beginning. We were expecting to start public beta testing in early 2021.
However, considering the latest projections, we think it is safe to assume that it will be early still. We decided to postpone the public beta testing one more time (and hopefully for the last time) to fall 2021. We are going to re-evaluate the situation in July 2021 to confirm this projection.
Private Testing
Meanwhile, we’ll get on with the expansion of our private testers right after implementing the Major Change we mentioned in the last post and previous sections. This is how our current estimated timeline looks like. Again, the timeline is subjected to many more amendments as we move forward:
Finally,
2020 wasn’t at all what we expected, but we survived! We never thought we could come this far without a full-fledged beta launch, but we did. We found a light at the end of the tunnel and figured it out. We have accomplished a total of 10 phases during 2020! We are always optimistic and determined, and we’ll figure out the rest as well!
We hope 2021 will be a much better year for everyone!
Till the next update, stay safe!
