With the release of this Beta, our support staff of one, Jack, went from a 50ish incoming / 250 backlog to a 150ish incoming with a 1000+ backlog, the current status of which is in flux and needs as much help as you are able to give it (it is also a treasure trove of information that is far too often overlooked, but you're wiser than that). Shortly after, NetNewsWire saw a semi-public Alpha release around the time of WWDC convention with a fully public Beta being released at the end of June. She regrets having many other IT, Support & administrative duties that kept her from devoting a fully focused QA effort. Sometime in June, Sheree was assigned and integrated with the team. Most of the testing was done by staff in a dogfooding manner. This has left the project in something of a debt, as far as robust testing goes. At the time of the project's renewal, there was no assigned QA staff (as all bodies were on client work at the time). The picking up of this project brought some important changes along with it: a more Agile focused (the Scrum variant of Agile with sprints, scrums, estimates, etc) team with a dedicated Product Owner (and acting Scrum Master), Hernan. Rob was sent on a sync reconnaissance mission, see Sync Note 1 & Sync Note 2. Michael's hands on any project will never steer you wrong. Rudy was brought on board somewhere in the interim and has been a real asset.
Rick was made the lead developer, as right as rain. strong influence all around, notably kicking butt on the Web site and icons, naturally. Olivier led most of the UI updates with John having a v. The NetNewsWire torch was picked up again and many features ripped out in order that we could ship a viable product before July. Somewhere between there and March is the announcement of the end of the Google Reader service that NetNewsWire 3.3 used for sync and iOS apps. Kaleidoscope roadmap was in flux and the team had made some maintenance releases.
#Sites that netnewswire does not support update
The product team was interrupted and for the most part, reorganized to focus on the release of Kaleidoscope 2 with a brief update to Versions seeing a 1.2 release. Daniel and the team tried very hard for a very long time but it was just not dependable at that time. There was a time of much consternation with iCloud sync services and ultimately that course had to be abandoned. A flourish of new features and ideas were implemented while the syncing solution was being worked on. Rick and Daniel were the lead developers at the time with no project management or Agile-ish practices invoked. Design was led by Phil and shaped much of what you see in NetNewsWire Beta 4 public release 1. Beyond seeing few maintenance releases there was no active development on the 3 lineage or the NetNewsWire iOS offerings.įor some time after acquisition, development was picked up on a lineage from NetNewsWire Lite 4 and, if I recall correctly, a wholly new iOS line with a shared Core library between the two.
NetNewsWire was acquired by Black Pixel circa July 2011. Now get to work!įirst things first, know your roots. Please don't take this document as the be all, end all I know you will find better ways of doing things. I have tried to look back and consider things I wish I had known when I was starting out and I attempted to document most of that here (even the bad stuff), coupled with my view on testing, pardon the editorializing.
Each tester brings something unique and highly valuable to the table, so while I'm sad to have only had a brief stint this time around, I am so excited to have your fresh eyes and sharp mind on the team, helping guide the project out of Beta. The team, product and skills here are unmatched in the field, yourself included. You are going to love this project and beg to never, ever be taken away from it. Passing knowledge and ideas about NetNewsWire and it's app ecosystem to get the new project Test Lead up and running fast. There are warts and things I don't feel great about but it is an interesting read all these years later. Now that I've spent some time walking down memory lane thinking about Kaleidoscope, I dredged up another nice document for NetNewsWire, this one is less of a test plan and more of an onboarding document I wrote up for a new to the field tester taking over the project.