In the past couple weeks, our staff has been working on bank transactions, the Find command, and breakdown tables. No major snags. Progress has been steady. It’s mostly just a constant process of testing, finding bugs, and fixing them. Rinse, repeat.
When writing new software, you might say that the code starts out as 100% bugs. Nothing works at all. Then, it gradually shrinks down to near 0%. For a major upgrade like this one, maybe it starts at 60% bugs.
Similar to construction projects, software has its phases as the structure gradually approaches completion. Most things move in spurts, often with months between them.
For example, the current version of Goldenseal accounting software uses four different types of bank transactions to handle checkbooks, cash, loans and credit cards. We decided to combine them into one. There are currently five different layouts for checks, payments, deposits, and transfers in/out. Those will also combine into one. The change is good for the long term. There will be less code to contain bugs, and a simpler interface for users. In the short term it means extra work.
Our staff finished the database changes for bank transactions more than two years ago.
Bank transactions are unusual, because each window shows transactions for just one bank account. Everything else groups all accounts together. That means some fancy coding for the menus in Goldenseal. We’ll still keep that setup for Goldenseal Pro, since most people work with one bank account at a time. But the accounts will now show individually in the outline view instead of in pull-down menus. We finished that work more than a year ago.
Current users have data that they’ll want to keep using. That means we need to convert it to the new format for Goldenseal Pro. It’s complicated because expenses and income transactions link to the bank transaction that paid for them, and they also need converting. We finished that last Winter.
Goldenseal currently uses a special window layout for banking, but we wanted to simplify that. We moved fields around and got the new windows working last week.
The basics now work for bank transactions, but some bugs probably still lurk. We will meet and conquer them as we finish banking reports and the Reconcile command, and start using it with our own data.
A similar spurty development process is happening for the Find command, breakdown tables, and every other aspect of Goldenseal Pro.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
