Sunday, September 24, 2006 - Sun, 24 Sep 2006

If you check my Future Plans page regularly, you’ll see that my tasks often change. I maintain that page as my own personal ToDo list for Behold. The tasks I’ve already done are marked with a checkmark. Then I have that cute little programmer icon working away on the task I am currently on. When I get it done, I mark it off and move it to the next one I plan to do.

I maintain that list so that it always reflects the order of what I plan to work on. When something new comes along, I add it into where I think I’ll do it. I often add, remove and reorder the list, so it should always reflect my current and future plans. I think that is quite an important thing to do and to make public. It keeps the pressure on me to do what needs to be done and I like that. I don’t know of any other genealogy program author that tells you of their future plans in such detail.

I also post a planned date for the release of every future version. I had qualifying that with an IAGW (If All Goes Well). Overall things have been going well, but still the dates have slipped, so the IAGW “excuse” is not a good one.

This is because those dates are the optimistic dates that I am aiming for. I purposely make the date something that will push me to get the work done. So on my Future Plans page, I am changing my terminology a bit, and am now calling it IEGP (If Everything Goes Perfectly).

The next version 0.98.7 alpha currently has an IEGP date of September 2006. If the pressure of having that date there gets me to finish it by mid-October, then its done its job!