vAMSYS v3 Development Policy Change

[Lukas Jankauskas]

During our Christmas Message posted at Discord last year, we announced our intent to stop active v3 development and focus our efforts on v4 at the start of 2021. 

But we found ourselves not quite done yet and you have offered us some amazing suggestions, which we worked to implement in v3, pushing away our intended end of active development date to the point where most of you probably do not even remember we announced in the first place.

As of 22nd April, we are stopping active development of v3 and refocusing our efforts to vAMSYS v4. Be not afraid – v3 is not being forgotten – it will still receive a lot of love in terms of bug fixes, which we will continue to implement as soon as we can as a priority. 

However, we will stop adding 3.X releases unless we receive a compelling idea on ideas.vamsys.co.uk with 15 or more upvotes. Ideas with that high upvote count will be evaluated for usability and application to all VAs using vAMSYS and will be implemented on a case-by-case basis into v3 codebase. All other ideas, including some with 15+ votes will be deferred to v4.

Our v4 codebase is still young and we will be sure to update you with development progress as we push ahead. We hope to have v4 ready by the end of the year – this is our optimistic timeline. We have a lot of code to write and increasing number of ideas to implement. Whilst we do not have set promises, these are our development goals:
•    No downtime due to migration from v3 to v4, unlike v2 to v3
•    Code improvements to make adding new features and fixing issues easier and quicker
•    Orwell improvements to allow Owners and Staff to manage VA better
•    Greater utilisation of JavaScript and its derivatives for a more seamless experience and better error reporting.

Those are the big 4 guiding principles which we will govern ourselves under; we will however do our best to implement as many ideas tagged for v4 as we can for initial release.

Needless to say – we will have a lot more to say once we pick up v4 development properly. We expect sprints in May followed by a little hiatus before we pick up again in July and over the summer, ideally resulting in some sort of Alpha before winter. 

Keep those ideas coming and bug reports flowing – your involvement keeps us at the top of our game and enables us to deliver the best possible Virtual Airline Management System out there.

Team vAMSYS