As promised we hereby give you some additional information about development & support on GPS-Speedsurfing.com. As many members will know www.gps-speedsurfing.com was founded more than 10 years ago by windsurfers for windsurfers. Ever since the platform has been developed and maintained by a compact core team that’s responsible for all development and support, day in, day out. 

This team is working on a voluntary basis and is spending hundreds of hours working on this great platform, doing this besides their day jobs. We are very happy with the financial support of our Premium Members and some of the leading brands & shops in the windsurf market. With this financial support we can cover most expenses like hosting and licensing, nowadays mainly services we obtain from the leading Cloud providers.

In a way GPS-Speedsurfing.com is one of the early projects that’s was funded by Crowd-funding. Being a Premium Member is a great way to support the community in an active way and show your appreciation for all the effort that has to been done to develop & maintain www.gps-speedsurfing.comfor all of us.

Last year we have upgraded the core backbone of our website, making it more flexible and stable for future developments. After this upgrade we have deployed a lot of releases (sometimes every week) introducing new features and a lot of bug-fixing.

In order to keep our priorities right and use our time as efficient as possible we have decided to make some small adjustments to our support & development process. In general this will be the way we will work in the next months.

We identify three important categories for support & development:

• Level 1 – Support & Maintenance on the core functionality (uploading tracks and the main rankings based on 5 x 10S AVG Day, Month and Year). Outage of those core functions will have the highest priority. It’s our ambition to solve these bugs within three working days.

• Level 2 & 3  - Other functions like evaluated rankings, track display, event rankings, etc etc. Any problems related to these features will be consolidated and prioritized in our backlog. We deploy every four weeks a maintenance release covering Level 2 & 3 incidents.
• New Functionality - We publish new website functions as soon as we have the core scenarios nailed and ship the bug fixes to web gradually after that. We rely on user feedback, the faster we get your feedback the better. The basic principle behind this approach is that ideas can sound great on paper but in reality turn out to be suboptimal. The sooner we publish new features, the sooner we will find out about fundamental issues that are wrong with an idea we had before. It’s our ambition to deploy every two months a major release with new functionality. Beta-releases and testing may be included in the regular releases every four weeks.

Feature requests for new functionality  and reporting Level 1,2 and 3 issues can be done by the Forum (category General).

As mentioned before we increasingly use cloud-services from major service-providers like Google, Microsoft and others to create additional features. Out of the box Cloud services are often much cheaper and faster to deploy. But’s it not always easy to manage and control the overall quality of those combined cloud-services. Developments of these cloud-services are going really fast and sometimes functionality or specifications are changed before we even know… We have a full-operational test-environment available for our core features, but not all cloud-services can be tested before deployment.

We hope that this additional information about our maintenance & support procedures will give you some more insight information how things are going behind the scenes. We want to thank you all for supporting our platform and don’t forget to enjoy your time on the water as much as possible, that’s what it’s all about!

GP3S Crew

Thanks to the crew for some more insight into the technical development cycle and future ambitions.
I am with a Belgian bank, a smaller but decent and stable bank. Their old internet banking module was working almost perfectly. Fast, responsive, accurate, stable, but the interface was somewhat dated and it had some well known but minor oddities in some real basic functions, that had been reported several times, but never got fixed. 
A few months ago they decided to modernize the interface and make it "mobile aware". Not even a week after the change, during several weeks, there were several outages a week, connections lost, cryptic error messages. As to layout, the reworked pages where full of white space, data coherence was lost, overview was lost, and even worse: the old functional bugs were still there. The helpdesk did respond to every complaint or suggestion, but only after days. 
Meanwhile, during the week of the outages, on the homepage of the bank's website, a rather proud picture + statement was up saying "we renewed our web interface, it is now even better, faster, more stable, handier and more fun to work with!". And further down, in the small print, it said "if you feel uncomfortable with the new look of the site and its mobile adaptability, it's just question of getting used to it".

Now, the difference with this site and the bank's site, is that I never got the banks helpdesk to communicate any mission statement or even a confirmation or timing about how they planned to fix the new interface, or even that the longer existing bugs would be solved at all. So I appreciate that the crew has the ambition to prioritize and to cyclically fix and republish and also work on older glitches. 
I still keep nagging my bank every 2 weeks about the old bugs that I encounter again and again during trivial basic operations like entering a payment order, checking bank status etc. and whenever there are outages. I keep getting the "thanks for your reaction, you will receive a reply soon" automated messages, and than after a few days the bland and fuzzy statements by the human being replying to the mails "We apologize for the inconvenience caused, your suggestion has been communicated to the technical team and it will be fixed in a future release". Therefore I appreciate the GPS team's approach to communicate more directly with us, end users of the site, and to pledge to an ambition to fix things within a reasonable and well-described timeframe. 
However, even within the structured cyclical approach you describe, there is still a risk of older bugs being carried along as new features are introduced. I hope those older bugs will not get orphaned. Fixing bugs is not an exciting activity, it is a lot more thrilling to introduce new features. But a stable core functionality seems to me a priority by any standard.

So I guess I am actually saying that you are running your development better and more professionally than a commercial institution is capable of, so kudos to the crew !

Although recently my work has brought me to an area far away from my favorite speed spots... be reassured that I will be extending my Premium Membership just to keep being part of the most alive and kicking web community i.e. gps-speedsurfing.com!!!

thank you for your efforts GP3S Crew