I thought this was worth a mention, and im sure it will be contested, but I believe that Aerosoft deserves an award for customer communication on developer projects. I think its the standard to follow.

 

Ive been following the CRJ 700/900 thread for a while now, and im so impressed by the constant communication by Mathijs Kok the project manager on the forums. Its nothing like ive seen in this hobby. The CRJ is a very very late project, but what a difference it makes when you dont wait for it in silence. Not only is their communication, fielding responses and inquiries from people, but the transparency of the state of the project is second to none.

 

The other week, this project went into beta and naturally a bunch of issues came up, but what we saw in the forum was the beta issues tracker posted along with its status of being fixed or not.  Who does that?  It is things like this that make a late project that is very much anticipated much more tolerable to wait instead of hanging in silence like alot of other projects. No need to point fingers at others, because granted not everyone can visit forums everyday, but the very least to communicate every few days or a least once a week. Maybe its just me, but this rapport with customers I would think goes a long way into instilling confidence in their projects along with thier history.  Here is the latest post of the current beta situation on the CRJ 700/900. The details forthcoming are much appreciated in that nothing hidden but all laid out pretty much in black and white.

 

 

As some people know on Friday evening I often try to write up what has happened over the week and what the status is on the most complex projects.  So it's 19:57 on Friday, I got my glass of wine and I spend an hour trying to get a full grip on the CRJ project.

Let me start by saying that the whole team is still aiming for end of September. We are doing 70 hour weeks to get that done. But there are certain unknown factors that being the project manager are mine to solve. For example we had some issues with sound that are now dealt with this week. Ingo who is doing the manuals had some personal stuff that needed to be taken care off so I took over one of the manuals (the easy one, vol 1). We got a kick &@($* team of testers and advisors who are sending in issues you will most likely never see but are being added to the "big list of things to fix". I have this week even started to tag some of the issue as "For Service Pack 1". Believe me that is a sign we are getting there. 

But there are also issues that are extremely hard to control. All serious work is on the FMS and HUD at this moment. Only this week did we get the nav data in the format we wanted (we'll deliver with a Lufthansa Sept 2015 database btw, no other company is able to deliver up to date databases on release) and still have to get a Navigraph database in the correct format. If we are late we'll even be able to include the October database, lol.

So things look good. But there are open issues. And we are attacking them. And we also know, that just as with the busses we'll  have open issues that need to be sorted out. But we have shown in the past that we stand behind our products and do not dump them on customers and leave for vacation. Just as the busses this is a core project. That means it will be updated over a long period. We'll listen to what you want and focus on that.

Finally, this afternoon I had a customer on the phone who asked me this: "With the Airbusses you had a very clear goal, you wanted to have the job of the flight crew in normal flight conditions simulated. With the CRJ it seems there is in parts a deeper system depth, but it's not clear how deep. So what is this CRJ to be?" 

A damned good question. Not easy to answer as indeed we fluctuate a bit between 'complete systems' and 'what is actually used'. Over time this will get more clear. I (and Digital Aviation) want to see how customers actually use the product before deciding on how to continue. It will remains a moderately priced product aimed at a mid to high educated user. We'll never say this is 'the Ultimate CRJ' as that is clearly not what we want. In my personal opinion a lot of the marketing words used to sell add-ons is way over the top anyway (99% accurate, what the heck does that mean?). So what do we intend to deliver? Basically it's easy. The best CRJ you can buy for FSX/P3D.  By a large, very large margin. Nothing even comes close. 

So will there be issues and bugs? Heck we try to do our best to solve them  but yes there will be. Some people will claim it is the worst add-on ever (actually there is one of those for EVERY add-on we ever did). But as always, and we got a damned good record on this, we'll listen and work on them. To proof my point, the A320 we done is currently in revision 2066. That means since we started the project we have had 2066 versions. The last update was this afternoon. And when we feel things are stable we'll do a 1.4 versions of the busses. Free of charge. The CRJ will be the same. Version 1.00 is a fine start, after that you tell us where you want us to go.

You can follow it here and the other project communication is similar. http://forum.aerosoft.com/index.php?/topic/33966-aerosoft-da-crj-preview/&page=186

 

 

I wish more developers could take this approach alot more.

 

I liked the sincerity, very responsible.

 

João Alfredo