Hi,

I wanted to let you know that we released the new Sonicbids’ support system this morning along with several minor updates. Lou will be following up with more details.

The update to production went well. Our developers and qa folks were all in the office and spent a lot of time verifying these changes. As always, if you encounter problems please let our support folks know immediately.

John

Hey all,

I recently had the opportunity to answer a few questions about Sonicbids over at the Music Careers section of About.com. Some of the topics covered include how to be featured on the Sonicbids homepage, where submission and subscription fees go, and the screening process for new promoters.

You can check out the full Q&A here.

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

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…)