Things take a lot longer in reality compared to what's in my mind. We have this beautiful plan laid out. It is just not working out fast enough. It is taking longer and longer. So, I decided to put together some conservative estimates and at some point I stopped because it was just getting unrealistic.
I try to use agile software development methods even though I am pretty much the only one developing. One of the principles of agile is that we don't plan too far ahead. There is a good reason for that. Priorities change all the time. Even if right now we could say these tasks are our "immediate" list, something may come along and trump that list. So, it's best to not even waste time to try to plan too far ahead when we know that it is probably not realistic.
In our case, this is probably a little extreme. My total tasks I have is 2,322 lines right now. About 190 of them are "urgent". So, I just prioritized what I think I can get done until this Sunday - which is probably going to take longer than I hope as well. That's about 90 lines. The rest of the 100 lines are in this semi-prioritized pile waiting to be pulled next week.
Life is not fair and certainly not very forgiving. I think success lies at a combination of luck and hard work. Can't remember who said it but I love this quote: "The harder I work, the luckier I get". So, we keep on trying as much as we can. We'll see what happens.
Now, I am admittedly a little pessimistic. There is actually good progress. We released the deal wizard and quick quote calculator and our new version is a big mile stone - so it's called Carsinia v2.0. We are also hiring a sales/support person - hopefully this will speed things up a bit as well. The feedback so far is pretty good. However, CredCo integration, EZ dealer finance credit application integration and a lot of critical forms are conspicuously missing. Not to mention some forms clients are waiting for, participation profit reports, lead life cycle management, vehicle type, rebate, fees, eBay, websites, Autocheck, etc. So much to do, so little time.
The highest priorities are CredCo and EZ integration. CredCo security scan revealed some issues with XSS (cross site scripting). I really do not think they are security issues. And what's worse, fixing those issues will potentially cause a lot of problems. I'm hoping that I will not be breaking anything while "fixing" their security leaks. EZ Integration is a pretty big project as well. I allocated one day for it - I hope that it's enough.
Carsinia dealer software
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