If you are getting a FileMaker application ready for sale, here is a rule of thumb to help you plan.
Software developers have noted that if one tracks the number of hours it takes to get your product about 90% ready for sale, you can estimate how long it will take to reach close to 100% sale-ability. Here’s how it works (as a rule of thumb): If it took you 200 hours to get it almost ready for sale (however you define that as 90%), then you can expect that it will take you another 200 hours to get it to 99% readiness, and another 200 hours to get it to 99.9% readiness, for a total of 600 hours.
So why would it take just as many hours to reach each of these levels? This is answered by the question of “How do we define each of these levels?”
Here is how I define them:
1. 90% readiness means that you can sell it now
– It may have a few bugs, but it is useable and people will find value with your product.
2. 99% readiness means that it is nearly perfect
– There are no discernible bugs, and is quite usable. To reach this level and eliminate all remaining bugs requires a lot of feedback from users, so that you can test your application in every possible user environment, operating system and version. There are not a lot of bugs to find, but they are tedious and hard to track down and fix. Thus it takes a while.
3. 99.9% readiness means that you have achieved Apple-level perfection
– This is the sort of app that not only performs flawlessly, it has no unnecessary parts. It is polished, and smooth, and perfectly suited to the job. No unnecessary features – just the features one would need and expect for this application. This requires removing, adjusting, tweaking and detailing. This can take a long time to get to this kind of perfection, and not many apps achieve it.
If you are thinking of selling your application soon, let us review it for you and give you an unbiased assessment of it for you.
~ William Miller, President
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