We’re approaching the point where we can announce the long-delayed web application I’ve been working on. Yesterday we were asked to comment on a draft of the press release (I was tasked to rewrite a misguided paragraph); this afternoon we have had a meeting scheduled to prioritize the still-unresolved bugs and other programming issues. (It’s been rescheduled; the weather’s a problem today.)
I spent part of the morning comparing the programming team’s bug list with mine; as you’d expect, they were similar, but had a few differences. Where the differences occurred was obviously significant: Their list included some bugs they’d discovered themselves, while mine included some I judged to be the responsibility of the “back end” vendor and had neglected to pass along to Tony. Another “feature” of Tony’s list is that it was “complete”–it included some bugs which had been fixed nearly a year ago. Good to track those; less good to fight through them when you’re trying to prioritize the stuff which is still open.
Then I took the reconciled lists, attached some proposed priorities (“Fix now!”, “Going to generate complaints,” “Annoying & probably easily fixed,” and “Next project”), and passed that version of the list to our staff. I’m awaiting comments, but don’t expect anyone to ask for significant changes. Then I’ll pass it to Tony so he’ll be ready when we meet.
Margie’s one of the persons who found the weather to be problematical. If she were here, we’d have spent part of the morning building a training plan for the support staff. Margie’s been collecting an issues list from my testing experiences; we need the phone staff to understand what we know and why we expect those things to generate calls. We also need to give the rest of the staff a look at the app, just on general principles. They’re going to be impressed; it’s a good system.
I imagine we’ll need to do a demo for high management, too. Margie’s problem, not mine.
Finally: Margie’s been working through a list of 1,500 applicants who’ve expressed interest in using the app; all are set up in the user database, but she needs to send notifications and background materials to them on or about the go-live date. (While credit card users can self-register, we need to set up the account customers from this end for security reasons.) She’s about a third of the way through that project.