As I noted yesterday the builders are finishing up the final touches on the next release. We spent time on final bug fixing and merging code from one branch to another (I’ll discuss this another time) and tomorrow we begin regression testing.

Regression testing, for me, is always one of the most exciting times in the project. This is when our QA team (our test team) runs through the product and ensures that the existing functionality has not been broken. The team has an arsenal of tests that they run in different browsers and on different operating systems. One of the benefits of a hosted application like Sonicbids is that we know the most common browsers and operating systems that our users have. This means we can focus our testing on these environments, reducing the risk that problems will make it out onto the Sonicbids website.

Time to catch up on e-mail and prepare for tomorrow.

John
CTO

The builders are heads down this week as we finish the integration with our new support system. This integration will provide a more robust infrastructure for the Sonicbids’ support team to work with the community. Look for this release to come out early next week, Monday or Tuesday.

I want to take a moment and provide insights on how the builders are trying to improve the work we do. I have been involved with dozens of major software releases in my career and two important keys for successfully delivering solid products on schedule is upfront planning and crisp communication throughout the project. We are focused on having clearer specifications for what is being built and on making use of frequent checkpoints during the project. These steps are important for us to be more predictable so that I can communicate our plans with more accuracy to all of you.

John
CTO

The builders have been keeping a close eye on the video conversion updates we recently made. Videos are converting significantly faster with the updated system.

This week I will give you some updates on our upcoming release plans. Feel free to drop me a note if there is anything else you would like to hear about.

-John
CTO

The Sonicbids’ video conversion process was created years ago and the builders have been spending time working on improving performance. We made some changes yesterday and we will be spending this weekend monitoring conversion performance. I will post updates over the course of the weekend.

John
CTO

Hey all,

It’s Friday, so I thought I’d get everyone ready for the weekend with a fun post. We all know the music business has its share of characters. While most are real people, some of them are in fact fictional (although after hearing the chainsaw story I still have a hard time believing that Irving Azoff was real). Anyway, here’s to the best managers that never existed: (more…)

The builders made some updates to the web site yesterday. We’re updating the site every week or two with a combination of bug fixes and minor additions while we’re making larger changes every 3 to 6 weeks. I’ll use the Builder’s Blog as a place to give everyone a lot more visibility into our updates.

This week we made several updates, including:

- If an artist had been selected for a gig that was shut down we were still incorrectly counting it as a booked gig in several parts of the site. This is fixed.
- Our promoters were experiencing some periodic problems with the Sonicbids site appearing to lock up on them. This was impacting some of our Internet Explorer users and is now fixed.
- A lot of minor cleanup beneath the covers that is focused on overall site stability and usability.

Okay, time to get more coffee and get back to work.

-John
CTO

Hi,

I wanted to set the Builders Blog up and use it as a better way of sharing what the engineers, or builders, at Sonicbids are working on. While this entry is an overview of the purpose of the blog, future entries will contain a lot more details regarding what we’re working on, when it’s coming, and any of the challenges we have in front of us. I may occasionally use the space to discuss technology, but I’ll limit that as the purpose of this blog is to keep all of you abreast of what’s going on at Sonicbids and how we’re working to make this service better, day by day.

When I joined Sonicbids in early summer, 2007, we had a small team of hard working and very dedicated builders. We’ve grown a lot over the last year and are aligning ourselves to more quickly address issues that come up as well as to deliver more solutions for all of you. We now have many more developers fixing bugs and coding features, quality engineers who test the code to help ensure the quality keeps getting better, and project managers and product managers who are working hard to help the builders know what is important to build and to build it on a schedule that makes sense for all of you. I know we’re far from perfect, but I can promise that we’re going to keep working hard and continue working to get better.

Okay, so what are the builders at Sonicbids working on now? We all believe that it is important to continue to put more accountability and transparency into the communications that take place between the artists and promoters on our site. While we clearly are the place to find gigs on the web, and we clearly have a fantastic user community, that is not enough. A community must be built on open communications and we know we can do more to help facilitate the communications and to provide transparency into the process. To this end, here are some of the big items we’re working on:

- Transparency. We want to do more and focus on giving artists a clear picture of what is happening every step of the way. Has the promoter reviewed my EPK? Did they play my video? The information is not visible enough today, but by the end of June there will be a lot more information available to everyone. This will be a first step, and I’ll talk in greater detail about this in upcoming posts.

- Accountability. If you’re paying money to have someone review your EPK, you want someone to review your EPK. The vast majority of the time this happens and the process works. However, we want to more clearly communicate what each promoter will do, and make sure that artist and promoters have the same expectations for the value of Sonicbids. What’s more important is we’ll make sure that money is tied to these expectations so that both artists and promoters can feel great about the transactions taking place on the site. Some of this work will take place in June and I will, as with the topic above, discuss it in greater detail in coming posts.

- Providing ever higher levels of support. Our process for how our customers interact with customer support is getting even better and you’ll be seeing even better systems being available in the first week of June. We will be releasing a much improved support system that works to get the right questions in front of the right people quicker, with our goal being for you to get the answer faster. I’m not going to pretend that this will revolutionize Sonicbids support overnight, it won’t. It will, however, be another step in making improvements in how we communicate, how we continue to be more transparent ourselves, and how we get issues addressed much faster.

- Fixing our mistakes. Hey, we are not happy when anyone finds a problem with the site. That means the builders didn’t get it right the first time (or sometimes the second or third time) and we want to eliminate things that are slowing you up.

Alright, I’m now shifting my focus back to working on the product.

John
CTO