[the.ak.hermit]

I am curious about this because the advancements are extremely slow, and I have noticed that when updates come out, they tend to fix a few problems, and create a few problems.

I wonder how many physical humans are working on the operating system, and who is actually testing these updates (besides normal RIM employees).

I get frustrated because things are going much slower than you would expect, and with the latest update, my GS2 wifi hotspot no longer works (which sucks), and I had to downgrade my home router to WEP to be able to surf without problems.

That is unacceptable from a tech company such as RIM, which I know has the capability and/or the ability to hire someone that does.

So how many? 1, 5, 10, 20?

[PTZ]

Not enough. The reality of the situation, with the Playbook being the first test of a qnx operating system there are probably alot of people tackling the problems. The firsters suffer through the system iron out of things that come up after launch. We are the chosen ones- made our own choice to be apart the big wait for remedies and solutions. I hear what you are saying, I honestly do not know the number.

[kb5zht]

Gauging from the rate of progress? One.

And he or she works 20 hour work weeks, gets 90 days of paid vacation a year and never is required to work in a month with an r in it.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[FourOhFour]

couple hundred. several thousand beta testers.

[joshua_sx1]

I've heard they fired that guy... asking bonuses... anyway, I guess RIM is hiring replacement...

Seriously, with their progress, and handling two OS at the same time (the Beta & Official OS's), I'm sure their manpower resources are inadequate... and one of the OS would suffer... I was only hoping that it would not the OS which is about to be official on Feb. 2012...

[ekafara]

They should reach out to all the bright minds that we have on this site. They have done a lot for things on the PlayBook already without asking anything for it(from what I've seen). RIM should get in contact with them and get them to help out, I'm sure they can be of some help. Even if it is beta testing. Heck, I bet a lot of those bright minds on here could beta test it and tell them how to fix it.

It's so annoying and frustrating to see this go so slow. I really hope we get a huge upgrade from 2.0, and hopefully it comes in February. I also hope that QNX on the phone is mind blowing also. RIM needs to deliver for the sake of their company and for the sake of all their present and future customers.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[the.ak.hermit]

They should reach out to all the bright minds that we have on this site. They have done a lot for things on the PlayBook already without asking anything for it(from what I've seen). RIM should get in contact with them and get them to help out, I'm sure they can be of some help. Even if it is beta testing. Heck, I bet a lot of those bright minds on here could beta test it and tell them how to fix it.

It's so annoying and frustrating to see this go so slow. I really hope we get a huge upgrade from 2.0, and hopefully it comes in February. I also hope that QNX on the phone is mind blowing also. RIM needs to deliver for the sake of their company and for the sake of all their present and future customers.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

You are absolutely right about bright minds on this site. There are quite a few people that frequent these forums that have a lot of talent in the technical department. I think that RIM should maybe try recruiting a few of them.

Of course, on the PR side, there are a few of those on these forums too! That is something else they need to seriously look at.

We, as consumers, want our devices to work as expected, and the people on Crackberry have the ability to make them work better than expected.

[KermEd]

I can only estimate based on what my company does. But...

2-4 Developers working on OS1 patching, likely one senior developer.
2-4 Developers working on OS2 patching.
4-6 Developers working on new OS2 apps.
2-4 Developers working on Android support.

The real bottleneck is likely to be testing resources. Every planned release needs to go through a full test cycle - it probably results in 3 of 4 official builds being delayed or rejected.

Keep in mind some of those teams may dual-task. That is work on OS1 patch on Mon/Tues and OS2 Wed/Fri.

RIM is known to under employ and overtax developers (check ratemyemployer). They also have an active PR team that creates artificial employee reviews.

But these days, it is actually incredibly hard to develop/test/release in monthly cycles. If you compare the updates to iOS or Android you'll see what I mean about these updates being more frequent than what is expected.

I also wish they had opened up the system more, I could easily organize a larger group of developers to build our own Linux based OS.

But - and I have said this a lot of times before - my PB does everything I need and want. Any changes coming are nice but not neccessary. I bought my PB based on current features, not upcoming features . But I have to caution, in most development cases the fantasy finished product (OS2) never has all of the features people want. A bug always appears last minute that affects the release and causes a feature triage.

For example, native email, bundled bbm, full apk support, unlocked android support, etc have all been developed and 'sent' to their testing teams before but removed because of issues or business decisions.

Ed

[FourOhFour]

I can only estimate based on what my company does. But...

2-4 Developers working on OS1 patching, likely one senior developer.
2-4 Developers working on OS2 patching.
4-6 Developers working on new OS2 apps.
2-4 Developers working on Android support.

haha.. this thread again?!

[the.ak.hermit]

I can only estimate based on what my company does. But...

2-4 Developers working on OS1 patching, likely one senior developer.
2-4 Developers working on OS2 patching.
4-6 Developers working on new OS2 apps.
2-4 Developers working on Android support.

The real bottleneck is likely to be testing resources. Every planned release needs to go through a full test cycle - it probably results in 3 of 4 official builds being delayed or rejected.

Keep in mind some of those teams may dual-task. That is work on OS1 patch on Mon/Tues and OS2 Wed/Fri.

RIM is known to under employ and overtax developers (check ratemyemployer). They also have an active PR team that creates artificial employee reviews.

But these days, it is actually incredibly hard to develop/test/release in monthly cycles. If you compare the updates to iOS or Android you'll see what I mean about these updates being more frequent than what is expected.

I also wish they had opened up the system more, I could easily organize a larger group of developers to build our own Linux based OS.

But - and I have said this a lot of times before - my PB does everything I need and want. Any changes coming are nice but not neccessary. I bought my PB based on current features, not upcoming features . But I have to caution, in most development cases the fantasy finished product (OS2) never has all of the features people want. A bug always appears last minute that affects the release and causes a feature triage.

For example, native email, bundled bbm, full apk support, unlocked android support, etc have all been developed and 'sent' to their testing teams before but removed because of issues or business decisions.

Ed

I guess the main issue that I take with development is that the current features still do not work as expected, such as wifi, which is the type of tablet the Playbook is.

If RIM would concentrate on making the current features work flawlessly, I would be pretty satisfied, but it seems that these very features are fixed, and then subsequently broken in updates, and then fixed again.

This is why I wonder if their "team" is really only a couple of people. I understand that code crunching is not easy, I am just frustrated that the current feature set is not working properly. I feel that version 2.0 will be plagued with the same issues, and I really hope I am wrong.

[trsbbs]

Some time ago it was stated that Jim/Mike (those at the top) were very upset at the amount of QNX resources being used for the PB and not for the BB phone line.

That was changed and resources were pulled from the PB to the BB phone line.

Then came the lay offs, departures, law suites, mis-steps, outages, etc...

Since then things have slowed to a laughable state.

[KermEd]

I guess the main issue that I take with development is that the current features still do not work as expected, such as wifi, which is the type of tablet the Playbook is.

If RIM would concentrate on making the current features work flawlessly, I would be pretty satisfied, but it seems that these very features are fixed, and then subsequently broken in updates, and then fixed again.

This is why I wonder if their "team" is really only a couple of people. I understand that code crunching is not easy, I am just frustrated that the current feature set is not working properly. I feel that version 2.0 will be plagued with the same issues, and I really hope I am wrong.

No worries

I totally think, as a consumer, you have a right to stand up for your consumer rights. And fundamentally, I believe the only way you can do this consistently with products is to be vocal and 'vote with your money'. I certainly understand why people are frustrated - I'm one of the lucky few who isn't really impacted by the issues.

But, these are my rough estimates . I would treat these numbers as the high-end estimate too. I work at another <unnamed> touch device company (that has its own issues anyway), and I think those numbers pretty closely matches what I'm seeing for output.

I'll leave it up to everyone else to judge the weight themselves. To put it into perspective, I would estimate ~ 1.2 million in development costs yearly for RIM in the PlayBook development + equipment / beta units / etc + support costs (RMA's, etc) as I'd assume they are paying 65k/year in their area for the average developer wage.

But thats just guessing now

[blackjack93117]

On these kinds of programs the rate of return typically decays with the number of programmers...because the confusion factor increases communication needs to increase, - more meetings, planning, sharing resources etc..more interruptions with people pinging on others for information impossible to concentrate on programming...by the end of the day the brain no longer functional and nothing has gotten done - add to that the stress posed by upper management...

2 programmers is twice as efficient as one
5 is twice as efficient as 2
20 is twice as efficient as 5
and so it goes...

sometimes one is better than 20 -

usually there is an optimal number - but 1000 certainly will slow progress to a halt.

[TaZ52083]

On these kinds of programs the rate of return typically decays with the number of programmers...because the confusion factor increases communication needs to increase, - more meetings, planning, sharing resources etc..

2 programmers is twice as efficient as one
5 is twice as efficient as 2
20 is twice as efficient as 5
and so it goes...

sometimes one is better than 20 -

usually there is an optimal number - but 1000 certainly will slow progress to a halt.

Agreed and wish there was more support for the playbook.

[lawguyman]

I think that the issue is not manpower. The issue is that RIM realized too late that it needed a new operating system and an operating system takes time to develop. RIM tried to do in one year what really should take two years. This factors in the advantage that RIM had with beginning with QNX and not a clean sheet of paper. So, Playbook was really released one year too early.

I am sure that there are different teams working on different things: a browser team, a user interface team, a bridge team, an email team, etc. etc.

Eventually each of the things that each of these teams is working on has to come together into a cohesive OS. Then you need to polish the whole package so that it seems like a cohesive OS.

RIM just reconfirmed a February release date for OS2. I think we'll see more at Devon Asia this coming week.

[kingbernie06511]

not enough.... but this is understandable considering OS7-7.1 programmers that are still stuck supporting a dying OS.

I give credit to RIM not to do like Microsoft... stop everything they were doing on windows mobile for 2y and come up with windows phone, after loosing their entire market share.

RIM does things in parallell...BBOS and BBX at the same time. BBOS are POS, but they still sell.

it will be interesting to see when all programmers will work on BBX