Development Timeline and A Developer's Axiom

Development Timeline

Software projects, like movies, are never finished, they're just released.  But unlike movies (unless you are George Lucas) software can be updated!

I write that, to write this...  The recombination exercise is completed, and the development team here at Dynamic Iterations is now writing new code to finish the initial feature set for EdgeVault.

And, that feature list is set.  Version 1.0.0 will have the Document Manager, the Contact Manager, and two components of the communications module, namely internal chat and email.

The bug reporting module will come out in an early future release, which we will be doing often.

Our Beta Testers and early adopters will have priority in deciding what features are needed, and which existing features can be improved.

Developer's Axiom

 Just because you can do a thing, 

doesn't mean you should!

Our customization effort includes form-building tools that involve using draggable screen elements to define a blank form.  This is also used to do the contact module designer.  Heady stuff, and we put some hours into getting it just right...  we couldn't find a plug-in that did what we wanted, so we made our own.

There was so much time invested in the draggable plug-in that I wanted to use if for other things, too.  In this circumstance, for the assignment of roles, users, tokens, etc.

But after the conference, after talking to people from hospitals, large practices, and other service providers, I realize that scalability, so much part of what we're building here, is going to kill this drag-and-drop interface that showed all the users in the system.

A visible screen element for each of up to several hundred users is  the very definition of cool and unusable.  We're talking Facebook Business Manager bad.
So, as cool as it is to use, when dealing with 6 users, 2 departments, 4 roles, and so on, when theres 200 users, 14 departments, and 26 roles, its unusable crap.

Oh well.  This is how software development works, and often, the simplest method is usually the best.