Our work recently consists of sketching features and laying down business and technical specifications for them. We found this as the most effective way to write software. Development (coding) itself is a rather straighforward and quick process when you have specifications and exact user interfaces for your work.

Anyways, this critical part of the product development is consuming more time than we originally estimated. This is primarily because we have insight in the business logic (thanks to our 5 year experience with SkaDate) and a lot of system components and classes are being laid down before any actual features.

Of course we could go the startup way – build underfeatured and shortsighted version 1.0 quickly and see how people react to it. In our case we’ve got substantial experience of building community sites for people so we have a great idea of what it takes. Specifically we project the software having in mind anything that will be necessary later. This approach is more consistent and is only possible when you have exhausting business logic details.

As for coding we are building languages and profile questions business layers and user interfaces.

What’s coming?
First of all we agreed to write full specifications for the current WackWall functionality so we can relaunch it and continue to quickly add functionality. Together with that we will start building infrastructure for OpenWack.org and put the software for download some time later. At this point I can’t provide any dates. We try not to make ourselves hurry too much.