WordSurv 6 Current Status
Dear Potential WordSurv 6 Users,
We wanted to bring you up to date on the status of WordSurv 6 and on our plans
for completion of the initial production release. Despite best intentions to
complete a stable Beta before the end of this semester, we are still working
with a "rough" alpha version. There are a number of reasons (but no excuses)
for this, including a busier academic schedule than our two student developers
(Mike and Nathan) anticipated, keeping them from putting in as much consistent
work time as was needed to reach our goal. The second reason was Dr. White's
inability to participate at any significant level due to some physical
limitations, preventing the thorough testing needed to complete this stage.
Both of these roadblocks have been addressed, as Mike and Nathan will be
working full-time starting May 30. A new team member, Ben Roller, will also
be joining our team as a full-time test coordinator May 23. Art White is now
working with a large-screen wide-format monitor which makes it possible for
him to see with much less strain and to spend more hours examining the
project's architecture and giving more "hands-on" direction to the student's
development efforts. Art has also been writing and testing the code for
importing studies entered as Excel spreadsheets since some survey teams have
requested this as a feature that would allow them to enter and examine survey
data in Excel while they waited for the production version of WordSurv 6 to
become available for final analysis of their data. We plan to integrate this
import feature into our first stable Beta release.
Our schedule, based on a realistic assessment of the newly available
resources, is as follows:
June 29 : Beta release with Excel import (COMPASS and Phonostats are
questionable)
July 29 : Beta release definitely including COMPASS and Phonostats
August 25 : WordSurv 6.0 production release
We appreciate your patience as we continue to develop this software. If you
have any questions, please send them to Dr. White (arwhite@taylor.edu) and he
will do his best to answer within 24 hours. We are particularly interested in
obtaining surveys that have or will soon be entered in Excel in order to test
our import strategy. Art would be glad to discuss format requirements for
these samples. We would appreciate your prayers as we enter into this
concentrated period of testing and development!
Sincerely,
The Taylor U WordSurv 6 Development Team