People who don't do software don't see why it should be any harder to make time estimates about software development than about any other kinds of projects, but they are not unreasonable for thinking that and your PR should take that into account
Hi toast,
Yes, you're right, this is one of those battles that software developers are always having with their managers too, I suppose. I'm not a PR guy, but I guess a PR guy might have trouble explaining the details of software development, so I'll take a stab at it.
Management always wants a hard date for software delivery, whereas the software guys know they can't really guarantee one, because on any reasonable size software project, it's very difficult to scope out enough details of the design ahead of time (nor is it even often fruitful to try to take the "design it all out first" approach, since once you get into prototyping the code, you sometimes find you need to take a different path than you originally anticipated).
Unexpected problems almost always arise in any truly "new" software (as opposed to adding a feature to an existing piece of stable software, where dates can often be set as long as the feature isn't "big"). As an example, in my own personal work in the past few days, I'd hoped to finish up the database versioning code, but I'm only partially done as I've had to fight problems related to register KHIDs with different capitalization and some related issues (collapsing of similar names like qqq and qqqq to be the same name). Fully understanding the problems associated with this (none of these issues were in code that I had personally worked with before), coming up with a solution that put the least demands on Keyhotee founders, then implementing and testing it, took several days I didn't expect to spend. But any real programmer will tell you this is typical of the job.
I understand people's frustration, especially as, by Bytemaster's own admission, his original deadlines were unrealistic, but all I can really say is that we're competent programmers, we're working as hard as we can, but we don't want to rush the software out before it's well tested. This just results in more problems, and makes it take longer to deliver a correct version of the software, since we then have to work around legacy problems from software delivered too early. Whether it's the end of February, the end of March, or even later, my main goal is to have a solid, upgradeable experience for Keyhotee users once the block chain is launched.
Anyways, I hope none of the above gets anyone too upset. It's just my own personal feelings about software development, and it's not been "vetted" by Invictus (or our PR department).