PlanningPuca: Announcing the Future Site release date WRITTEN BY Daniel Miller

Welcome back to Planning Puca!

As I write this, we have just finished taking down the Future Site preview, and I’m sitting at a desk covered with what I believe to be the last remaining sticky notes that stand between us and the full launch of the new site.

Tim and I have spent the last week poring over all the bug reports and feature suggestions that our fantastic member-testers submitted during the course of the preview. After sorting and categorizing them all, at this week’s sprint planning we sat down as a team to go over the full list. Our goal was to prioritize everything, and to narrow what was 100% necessary to resolve before the full launch of Future Site. Included in this was the creation of notes for designing and re-building the new PucaShield feature on the Future Site code base.

With this done, we now believe that we know everything that is left to do on Future Site. Thanks to tracking our work through the project management tools I’ve discussed over the past few months we can also say with confidence that we know how fast we usually get this type of work done; how much hidden work we generally find on a week-to-week basis; and how accurate our predictions and understanding of our work process has been up to this point. Thanks to all this, we’re now ready to announce a release date.

We are targeting Sunday August 21, 2016 as our official release date for Future Site.

We’ve got a lot of work to do between now and then, and this timeline will by no means be easy to fulfill. We are, however, confident in our ability to hit this mark.

Future Site will continue to be a work in progress after launch, with us focusing on bug fixes and new features in a fast and efficient way; but by setting a release date we are acknowledging that the day is coming up very soon where the product we’ve got is final, and that will mean that we can no longer fix, tweak, and polish all the little details that may remain.

Will everything be perfect at launch? Certainly not. There will be bugs and visual issues like there always are with the launch of any complex and feature dense website. We do have a secret weapon though: after the release of Future Site, for the first time in PucaTrade’s history we will have a full time design and development team using a refined project management system to work on one website exclusively. I honestly cannot wait to show the world what our team is capable of.

In the coming weeks, I’ll have two more Planning Puca articles before August 21st. These will likely be shorter and focused mostly on our specific progress towards the release, with info on any schedule updates that may become necessary if we end up run into setbacks.

In the meantime, I need to dive back into finished a couple more spec sheets. I hope you’re all as excited as we are as we look forward to the Puca Future!