CorOS 2.0 release / communication of progress

[Niksounds]

But simply have fun now with everything that has the cortex? no?
TOO DIFFICULT?
aaaaah… ok ok … ok…
just enjoy this supercar as the updates will come…people.

I’ve said it elsewhere and I’ll say it again now that the thread is revived: if the goal is to have a healthy community of respectful users, replies like this should not be tolerated. I don’t mean to tell the mods how to moderate their space, but these are the comments that always cause these types of threads to devolve into an unproductive quarrel and get locked/deleted.

There is nothing wrong with bringing up legit concerns in a respectful manner, especially for us users who really hope to see the QC develop into what it can be. Allowing users to ridicule other users for voicing these complains does a lot more to breed negativity and dissent than any “negative” thread. If the thread doesn’t concern you, you are free to close the tab, move on with your day and even maybe go enjoy everything the Quad Cortex has to provide.

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It is natural for QC owners to be frustrated by the pace of development at this point. COVID and perhaps some focus on Darkglass may have tacked on an extra year (total guesstimate) to the current development cycle. To be fair the features Neural appear to be concentrated on right now (revamping the cloud, desktop editor, incorporating plugins, improving footswitch assignability) may require some pretty heavy lifting.

While communication and public relations are key components in maintaining a positive relationship with your customer base, as everyone knows, it is a fine line to tread. Release too many details about what your development team is working on, and you risk raising expectations for features that may either take longer to code than anticipated, or never be delivered at all. Line 6 for example approached this dilemma by releasing only sparse details about updates but mitigated that by keeping a very active presence in their forum for the first couple of years, and afterwards on TGP. That presence was reassuring to Helix owners even if they had frustrations regarding the paucity of development details.

I think there may be a somewhat collective feeling at this point in the QC community that it is time to deliver. This sentiment is predictably nonexistent or weak among the forum members who find that the QC is doing everything they need already and tire of the requests for the firmware to be released. This and the fact that some people are just more patient by nature or have alternate equipment they are using in the interim.

The calls for better communication, more information, and release details are because right now, customers have a higher percentage chance of seeing improved communication, than impacting or even gauging the actual date of delivery. However, that is really what it is about now - delivery. All the communicating in the world is no substitute.

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We are all free

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@HonestOpinion I totally agree with you and especially love the term about the “fine line of detail” in publishing news. This time it is also really heavy lifting as you’ve put it.

My personal need is having an idea of the amount of work left over (not in detail, not in actual quantity) because I am preparing my next season as guitarist for several professional cover bands. I’ve created lots of presets on a per-song-basis, partially with automation and some also as generic overall sounds.

Knowing if it is realistic to rework all those presets in time would help me a lot. Last season I tried several workarounds which went south in a live situation. (e.g. due to a missing overall EQ / switchable Solo Level, misleading labels of captures, usage of footswitches for starting playbacks via CC etc.)

Having a burndown rate like below would give me an impression of what I have to expect and what I can plan upon and is quite common in agile development methods:

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I have never seen any other (non open source) development company share any data at that level, and would not expect it either. That would open them up far too much and share everything with the competition.

Agile development is, as the name would suggest, agile. Features may be reprioritised based on new information, or other work that must take priority or for a whole host of other reasons.

I’m not even sure how that information would help you either? You would still need a full list of features, expected release dates, and all of that could be subject to change at any point.
What would you want the burn down to be for? A sprint, an epic, a release?

We have already been told multiple times that the release would only be held back by “showstopping bugs”, so it is safe to assume this is the issue.
Bugs are also, by their nature, very difficult to timebox as you often don’t know how long it might take to find the root cause.

I would much rather I had to wait a while longer to have fewer bugs in the release, than to update my device and have it fail.

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Neural DSP does not owe anyone a bug burndown list. As an engineer myself, I can’t fathom a company even releasing information like that. That is beyond wacky. If there wasn’t a showstopping event happening, we would have the release by now.

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I can’t Internet laugh hard enough at this post.

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The company I worked for implemented ERP systems in that way. Those projects had a duration between 2 and 5 years.
I mean I see, that it is quite unusual doing so publicly.

But since the testing / bugfixing phase usually takes longer than reaching a beta release (at least in my experience with “purely” software development) it could answer the question where the development is at.

@tomfs I would simply sugest it only for testing phase per feature announced. To make it more specific the chart maybe reflecting the bugs found during tests of “Hybrid mode” in the period from hand out to testers until final Major(!) release. Minor releases excluded.

Well thanks for sharing. If it is not in your interest, at least you are having a good time.

I agree that sharing this type of information is probably a bit too much to ask. But I think they need to seriously consider taking a very different approach with their PR, because right now they are making themselves difficult to get behind as a company.

We can’t forget that NDSP made the decision to put themselves in a very unconventional position by advertising those infamous missing features pre-launch and pushing them back to “soon after launch”. This gave the customers (well, me personally at least) a very clear idea that they were in a fairly advanced state and mostly functional, but needed a bit more polish so they decided to delay them a bit to stabilize the release build.

The fact that many of those features are still missing paints a completely different picture. I understand that software development is incredibly volatile and many things can go wrong, but going from “shortly after launch” to two years without anything is quite frankly worrying. To me, this makes it seem like they either don’t really understand how to develop for their own hardware. Or they lost most of their devs who knew how to. Or that they have critically over scoped for their team size and have a massive recruitment problem. Or worse, that they advertised the features without even knowing for sure if they were feasible.

I can’t think of a single company outside of vaporware/NFT stuff (or Tesla, lol) that takes the risk of advertising a feature without it being in an advanced development state, or them being absolutely certain that it’s doable. I always perceived NDSP as much more trustworthy than these types of businesses, but the sentiment is starting to change.

Like HonestOpinion already stated, if releasing what we’ve been waiting for is still not an option in the short-term, there really isn’t a way to restore our confidence other than being as transparent as possible. I just really don’t think it’s a good strategy to let people speculate about what catastrophe may or may not be going down behind the scenes. And if the best plan they have is “tell them as little as possible”, to me it’s like telling us “you would be even more worried if you knew”.

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*sigh*

Now we’re getting in the weeds with metrics and KPI. What a waste of time for any dev to have to respond to that level of shoulder-tapping.

EDIT: Why do I keep coming back to posts like this. Why.

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I can not answer your question :wink:
But I would be interested how you solve situations, where nervous customers ask when they can expect a result?

From my side its only a brainstorming and I am very interested in other ideas…

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It shouldn’t make you that nervous. It’s literally gear. If you feel you can’t depend on it without future updates that can’t be confirmed, then use a different piece of gear. It’s actually not that big of a deal, one way or the other. People are very much overthinking and overanalyzing all of this at this point. Simply wait and see what happens and decide what’s best for you

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The only thing that bothers me is the language trickery used. “In the coming days” is sort of a meaningless catch-all, because that can mean anything. It’s a lame trick used by corpo tech bros in silicon valley, which is unfortunate because I consider NDSP to be a cut above that sort of bullshit. It’s an easy way to avoid culpability.

On the subject of “things promised,” it falls into that same techbro CEO mentality of advertising things that never come to fruition. I don’t think it’s out of line to be a little miffed about NDSP not including things that THEY advertised as being part of the unit.

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@BigMcLargehuge as I understand, you would prefer having a reliable target date and in case it isn’t matched being miffed about it? Do I get you right?
Sorry I am not a native english speaker and just learned a word :wink:

It’s just because my intention is to collect ideas / solutions on how it can be improved for us users.

@danimaetrix I assume, that you wrote in good intent. But can you explain how selling my beloved piece of gear could help here?
Don’t be angry, but since you already replied with this solution before: It sounds a bit like “gear fashism” of the kind “if you are not happy here, go away”. You might realized, that “don’t be angry” would not reduce any anger. Sorry for the comparison! :slight_smile:

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What I’m saying is don’t use it for live shows or tours until you are confident it will work for you. That’s up to you to decide - but you should try not to let emotion get in the way because at the end of the day, it’s just a tool for getting your sound to the house. There are many other things you can use in place in the meantime, if you are not confident it will be ready in time. Obviously the team works as hard as they can - there’s not much more to it than that. Only you are responsible for what you bring onstage, not the NDSP timeline. If it’s making you that anxious, don’t rely on it - that’s what I’m suggesting - there’s nothing more to be done.

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I’m genuinely puzzled by this thread. I don’t understand how a software engineer with 20 years of experience would think that it was even a possibility that burndown charts and bug ticket status would be shared externally. I’ve been writing code for longer that that, and have never heard of such a thing. I can only assume that OP has witnessed it elsewhere, but it’s surely a rare occurrence.

Of course @danimaetrix wrote that comment with good intent. If the product isn’t meeting your needs, use a different product. Return to this one if you feel like it when appropriate. We’re in a golden age of modellers, there are options.

Edit: @winstonschroeder I understand why you’re asking for this detail, and how it would benefit you. It’s also not for me to say what NDSP will do for you - I don’t represent them. I hope things work out in your favour.

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Hey @danimaetrix and @SkeletronPrime,
please take my apologies if my phrase “I assume the positivity” has a negative connotation to you or others. Maybe “I believe” would have been better…

@danimaetrix please don’t focus too much on my suggestion. I am trying to collect ideas for people that share my discontent in regards to the communication/transparency. Do you maybe have a proposal out of your working experience how to come around this issue?

… and without going too much into detail: I worked for a MS Dynamics 365 implementation partner where we shared these KPIs with our customers. Different scenario, I know. :slight_smile: But it was the first idea that came to mind.
MS calls it “success by design” as (partially mandatory) part of their “fast track” program. (see D365 Implementation Guide)

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@winstonschroeder Thanks for the explanation/example - I think that’s really interesting. I learned something new!

Hi Winston -

I’m also an experienced software developer, so I understand where your suggestion is coming from, and have my own frustration with their progress. Here’s where I’ve landed on the issue, based on my experience working in software dev:

I think Neural has (1) brilliant engineers, (2) visionary ideas for the product and (3) over-zealous marketing thereof that gets ahead of things.

I think they are most definitely missing mature product and project management skills.

That’s not surprising how young the company is. Startups that experience quick growth often need to scramble to get professional management in place. I’m hoping they get there. The “it will ship when it’s done” approach they’re communicating is a classic “engineers completely in charge” thing. Of course the shouldn’t ship bad product, but having managed scope CAN result in delivering on more predictable (if not 100% assured) schedules.

Making that change is going to have to come from within them, and over a period of time. So I’ve settled on accepting the product as is, not counting on when updates may happen, and if it’s not meeting my needs I’ll move on to another product. That attitude lets me be a fan of the company and root for them, but not get too wrapped up beyond that.

I do wish they’d do a more structured job engaging us in the product roadmap. I’m not at all clear on what uses cases they’re solving for. They could have product managers define user personas like “club performer”, “bedroom producer”, “guitarists with QC and lots of outboard pedals controlled with MIDI”, etc then run online sessions with those of us that self-identify in these groups to ask our needs and opinions on features. That would build a bond.

Personally, I just want the thing to send multiple midi commands per footswitch so I can control 3 pedals via MIDI without introducing a Morningstar onto my board. I literally have NO IDEA if that’s going to be in this 2.0 release. I didn’t want a looper, don’t care about hybrid mode, don’t think the file system is broken, etc. A clear roadmap of “here’s who we are building features for and here’s where we are headed” would be so helpful. I might be 2% of their target market and not worth developing for, but that would be good to know.

My 2 cents.

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