Have to remember that falling off the market could mean getting delisted by exchanges, major selling big investors and the price plummeting.
Maid is also a currency used to pay its team, if it’s currency becomes worthless there may be a day where there is no more funding…
Have to thread carefully or all this may mean nothing in the end.
I think you are starting to over state things here.
Considering Maidsafe company doesn’t have that much MAID this statement is wrong. They are piad in fiat and most of Maidsafe’s money is in fiat and BTC
We’re approaching the chicken-or-egg territory.
If the team puts through a decent work with a lot of progress, the project will not fall down the charts and off the market and it – most definitely – won’t repel big or serious investors. I mean, it may not dominate the market, but it won’t plummet or disappear completely.
In this case, results themselves are the roadmap. No other roadmap is possible to give when you head places where no man has been before. You create it as you go.
If, on the other hand, there are no relevant results over a certain period of time, the threat of losing it becomes real – and deservedly so. Unfulfilled promises only make it worse. You can only build a baseless momentum for so long, and when it becomes clear you have nothing but big words, the effect will be even more devastating than doing / saying nothing would have been in the first place.
The weekly dev and marketing updates are great in this regard. It is obvious that good progress is made every week. Combined with test and alpha nets, it is impossible to ignore/discount.
Sure, we are all waiting for the big alpha 3 and 4, but steady as she goes!
I think its called de-risking a project.
No other roadmap is possible to give when you head places where no man has been before. You create it as you go.
To an extent. But the devs aren’t just making it up on the spot, they have a much better idea of what’s going on in terms of overall progress than the rest of us.
All these weekly updates mention things that are being worked on. There are many other snippets of information about progress in other topics, posted when it becomes relevant to a forum member’s question.
There’s already a roadmap, it’s just distributed around this forum in an inaccessible format. This is why the marketing team should make a habit of adding each newly found detail to an actual roadmap (IMO). The roadmap and developer updates could be best friends, and we would all be more informed.
While I agree that this project has large scope, I disagree on the sense that its not possible to provide a set of deliverables and a given target date. If you can’t articulate all the smaller pieces to the project and get a really good list of “tasks” then its hard to maintain a real view into the % completion from a development perspective.
Something like this:
(All tasks complete ='s working Safenetwork product)
Task | Target Date | % Complete | Current Roadblocks
Sure I get that what is being developed is a hella lot tougher than a standard application program, and honestly who cares if you go over the target date, no one will cry about it. But it will be a good wake up call to figure out within the team is good at predicting their ability to deliver working code. Devs that hit their target dates and demo the working tasks scripting in action should then be given the more challenging tasks ahead in the roapmap and a better salary or however that works in a crypto space company(more coins to hodl lol). Developers who struggle to meet target dates should be given extra assistance and open discussion time with seasoned developers to hopefully work through any challenges they face and grow as better developers. That is just my two cents as a younger programmer working at a large tech company in the US.
Famous last words. Go back a couple of years when target dates were given and you might see the angst the dev team went through with the criticisms etc when a bug cropped up, or the path they went down hit a roadblock that required a redesign of that section.
They are working on a new roadmap that goes beyond alpha 2 & 3 & 4
But unlike large commercial hard projects this is really a R & D project that requires research of how things are to be done and when a particular path of development proves unsuitable then a redesign is required. When these things happen we can see a month or two of work having to be redesigned which then means upto 90% of the last 2 months on that component scraped and lessons learnt and component done the right way.
So no it is not possible to give dates as this brings about problems by those who want it NOW. Also on a smaller scale days can be “lost” when a bug needs fixing. So if they have 5 of those sort of bugs then the deadline is 3 weeks late and that segment of the dev team is abused by a few for those 3 weeks.
I should have phrased it as no one within the MaidSafe company will cry about it. Anyone that works in development knows most projects go over initial timelines and require edits to get just right. I am sure this project will not dodge such bullets as no one is perfect 
. And maybe they do keep an internal ledger of tasks and progress made, If they could deliver the meta data of that to us all at given intervals I think that would suffice as well.
Of course they do.
A few people though are wanting the project finished at a set time and thus calling for dates to be set. Those who are fine with dates slipping are usually not the ones asking for a set date roadmap to be published publicly.
Unfortunately we have the situation where a few buy some MAID and want the project finished so their 100$ or 1000$ or 10000$ dollar worth of MAID goes 10x or 100x upon release.
Maybe with the marketing push starting this year we will also see a suitable roadmap that provides the way forward without the problems set dates give.
The percentage completion is a tough part. The engineers can have implemented 100% of the coding tasks, but find out through testing that it does not work as intended and need to re-evaluate and reimplement based on this feedback. So really hard to know % progress on this basis.
Hey you are a dev at Maidsafe right ? Thanks for responding! (Edit: I see you are COO Maidsafe after a quick google, cool! I assume you have some dev background though?)
I agree, but then again all those values are flexible in my mind. You can have % complete @ 100 on a task, but then find out later that its integration with another piece to the network is flawed. So then proper action would be to highlight/tag those tasks that are not playing well together and reset their % to something lower based on a guesstimate of TTF(time to fix) and Roadblock portion just mention the integration problem found between the two “tasks” / scripts.
As a dev I agree documentation and publicity like this are a huge time drag, I personally hate it. Our company makes us maintain sooo many git issues and provide daily updates I feel like I spend more time documenting what I have done or will do rather than doing it 
. But from the other side of the fence I understand why management expects its because it gives them insight into progress without having to talk to me daily.
No worries Jeremy. I don’t have a dev background, more general business and marketing. I’ve been working in software companies for around 10 years (web dev co before MaidSafe).
We have tried many different ways of doing this, but have found the process of guestimating to be inaccurate and counter productive. As we mentioned in a blog post “We believe that publishing release dates that have a high degree of uncertainty attached is not helpful to anyone and can cause more frustration than not publishing them at all. Network related development is typically where the biggest black holes are and as we get into incremental development client-side, we anticipate time scales will become more predictable.”
Also, this issue is not really about the administration for us, as you know we publish detailed dev updates, design plans, RFCs and more besides. I completely understand why you are asking, dates would be great, but we are at a stage of development which still has a few unknowns and once we remove those predictions could become much more manageable.
Thanks for the internal insight, gives me a nice perspective from someone embedded within the project. And keep up the great work! MaidSafe is easily the most ambitious project in the crypto coin space in my opinion. Will be looking forward to what 2018 brings us all.
Cheers!
-Jeremy
I get it, and you’re right. But the fact all those tiny bits of information are to be found here and there and everywhere sort of underlines what you can sense, the progress is not linear. One step forward, a half-step to the side, a half-step back, and back on the track.
Unless they feel comfortable narrowing it all down at the moment, they shouldn’t do it. Not for me anyway. Though for the sake of transparency, it would probably look good. Something to stick on your refrigerator I guess
Completion % is always attached to SOW Scope which should be part of the
NFR- New Feature Request
CR- Changer Request
BugFix- Cycle
Having a Release Schedule with tight SOW Scope listed as a requirements doc filled with primary/secondary and exception use cases, where the SOW itself included within an Acceptance Plan together with timeline estimates for each use case, and which also pairs up the test cases and method for each use case found in the plan, makes it absolutely possible to measure a sft. eng. team’s percent completeness per task/use case in the Acceptance Plan.
to Add - each use case has a set of metrics assigned
I have no doubt work is progressing and diverting the whole team to one part of the project indicates, to me, the priority of this issue. The only concern for me is whether available funds will meet the timeline
I doubt they would be setting up new offices (previously in Scotland, India in next few weeks) and be working with such depth of engineering discipline if the wolves were at the door.
I would expect a company in panic mode to be obsessed with secrecy and drumming up hype. I don’t see either of that here.
I know what you mean but my concern is for mid 2019 and thereafter if they are still in Alpha 2 and 3.