Testing and Tasting for the New Voice123

Hello!

It has been a week since my last update and there is a reason for it: I have been really busy testing features and tasting Chinese Dim Sum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dim_sum).

First of all, I want to clarify something: Although I write “I” many times, “I” couldn’t do much if it wasn’t for the help of many people at Voice123 and Torrenegra MarketLabs. Whatever I report to you in this blog is the result of more than 10 people working full-time on this project, plus many other helping every now and then. THANK YOU!

Where are we now with the New Voice123? I was supposed to test three systems over the previous weekend that were already checked by the QA team. Unfortunately, Saturday afternoon I found a roadblock: Windows Vista started to freeze every 20 minutes or so. Why? I guess it has to do with the fact that I installed Vista on my new Mac Book Pro. I know, I know, shame on me for installing an OS not yet supported by BootCamp (http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/). It took me around 10 hours before I completed removing the Vista install and I had XP and Mac OS working again using Parallels. The 10 hours included moving all my docs and toys to XP back from Vista. It has worked pretty well since then. Why do I want XP running on a Mac? Easy: that way I can randomly test the new features of Voice123 in both systems.

I took Sunday off to enjoy the Chinese New Year celebrations at Chinatown in Manhattan. (They had fireworks this year!) I restarted QA on Monday. Almost all the new features and systems tested this week passed my QA with no issues at all. There was only one system with problems: the new project management system for voice seekers. It failed some major requirements. MarketLabs is currently working on fixing them. There is another system, which I cannot mention yet, that has been delayed more than expected and that I haven’t been able to test yet. If everything goes well, I will be able to test it early next week.

All these updates mean that the alpha milestone should be reached sometime next week . Once we get there, and as a gift to our blog readers, we will publish all of the new features of the New Voice123 here before we send an email to all of the users of Voice123. Stay tuned!