Still a Few Bugs in the System

Where’s my damn RightSite?! That’s what I keep asking myself (and my development team) after working on this project for the last seven months and going through what seems like 1,258 schedule changes. Well, from what the development team in India tells me WE ARE ALMOST THERE!  Somehow this is vaguely reminiscent of what my dad used to tell me when he would take me hiking when I was about five years old.

Baby Mike, “I’m tired — are we there yet?”

Baby Mike’s long-suffering pop, “We are almost there!  Stop complaining – it’s only another 9/10ths of a mile.” (Knowing full well that my five year old brain had no comprehension of a mile or of 9/10ths of anything).

Now it must be only another 9/10ths of a module before the site is finished.

To make things slightly less opaque, our developers had neglected to consider what order the values on the site’s menus should appear in for the Chinese version of the site, and I was not pleased with their assumption that the Chinese menus should just use the same sequence as the English menus.  There was also a considerable SNAFU regarding the translation of the listings on the site that obliged me to make the team go back and do a number of things over again.

The project schedule now looks a bit like this:

• Week of 27 October: Fix the listing translation issues
• Week of 3 November: Fix the menu sequence issues
• Week of 10 November: Remove any remaining bugs and get the site onto a proper hosting server (it’s on a development server at the moment)
• Week of 17 November: Perform UAT (User Acceptance Testing) on the site on its new host
• Week of 23 November:Make any post-UAT fixes
• Week of 1 December: Go live and shake the world!

While we are now confident that this should be the final schedule for the site, we also realise that many schedules have died a slow, miserable death because of this project.

In the meantime, we are getting ready to have a small event on 19 November for a few friends who will help us test out the site. The party concept revolves around getting a group of property professionals in a room with a bunch of computers, introducing them to the site, giving them copious amounts of beer, and then asking them for constructive feedback.

On the plus side, we had a great marketing meeting with Edward Zhong and Gary Yan from Changshu Economic Development Zone. Changshu is second-tier city near Suzhou, and they opened their development zone in 1992. Edward and Gary gave an impressive presentation on the appeal of Changshu for foreign investors and were excited to see the opportunities for promoting their properties on RightSite.Asia.

Wish us luck!

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