Short answer: We don’t know. As a first reaction a customer might say “How stupid can you be to don’t know when are you going to release a product update?“.

Long answer: the fact that we do not know is actually positive. In software it is more or less impossible to perfectly predict when something is going to be production stable. There are only two types of estimations :

– your prediction is conservative and you complete before the scheduled date. As most product managers believe that it’s right to stick to announced dates, they release on the scheduled day. It is quite uncommon to deal with too conservative predictions, in most cases it happens the other way.

– your prediction is too aggressive. As you get closer to the release date, you realize that it will be impossible to stick with it. But customers stress sales, sales stress product management and in the end stress goes on production guys – developers, qa, etc. They start to make mistakes, or even worse they agree on little compromises that speed-up the release.

Myth: There might be companies that say “We have never missed a release date.”. The truth is that these companies have never missed a release date because all estimations were conservative. Most likely they could have released the product several days or even weeks before (depending on the development cycle).

We dealt with both conservative and aggressive estimations, and each one of them was bad. Of course, the first case is preferred over the second, but if you want to send a conservative estimation you will end disappointing people and even more dangerous – you can make pm, developers, QA lose focus. That’s why we decided not to give any estimation regarding the release of VoipNow 2.0.2, we can only say that it’s going to be released somewhere in the next 30 days.

The release criteria is that VoipNow 2.0.2 will be made public immediately after all important bugs are fixed and after the product passes all the release tests.

What I can do later today is to present you all important changes in VoipNow 2.0.2. Thanks for patience.