The end of Milestones v1.1 is in sight!

There’s only five issues left to deal with in order to get Milestones v1.1 functionally complete. After that comes final testing, and making sure that the installer works properly for both upgrades and new installations. Each of them appears to be no more than a few hours worth of work, but since we deal in software, you know that averages out to about a day to finish each one.

The installer process will be the worst one to deal with I think. For Milestones, I made a concentrated effort to make sure that the installer just works. No hassles, no fuss. There’s nothing worse that downloading software and having installation problems. I think of it like registration or license code problems. It’s not even a real part of the application, but without it you’re ship is sunk. It’s really a pet peeve of mine. I’ve completely skipped over software that didn’t install correctly the first time every time. That’s one of my major beefs with Oracle.

If it’s a complicated install process, you would be wise to test it as thoroughly as you can before you let it out the door. After all, the installation is the first part of your application that people are going to see. And if the installation fails, not only do you look terrible, but you have zero chance at the user making an educated guess about whether it solves his problem or not. In fact, it’s even worse because the only thing he knows is that you product won’t install.

Is it a good product? Who knows? Will it solve his needs? Who cares. If it won’t install, it won’t run, therefore your problem cannot be solved with that software, unless of course you were looking for 53Mb of NOOP statements and an error.

If a company can’t take the time to make sure the installer works properly, what makes you think they took the time to do sufficient testing on the rest of the product? Interesting question, don’t you think?