It's been a while since I posted an update about the BB2020 effort for FUMBBL, and I was going to start writing a post on the #ffb-test discord channel but decided it would be better suited for a blog on here to make things visible to everyone.

In the last blog post I wrote (mid December), I asked for help with managing the BB2020 project. Both in terms of an overall project manager and someone to take point with the test effort. A number of people reached out offering to help (thank you!), and I took on board a couple of people to fill those roles. The idea was to offload some of the management things from my shoulders to alleviate some pressure and allow me to put more time into the development-side of the project instead of managing a test team and documenting what needs to be done.

Taking on people to assist with these things generated a ton of extra work on my end, trying to come up with suitable workflows and ways to communicate between the test team and the developers (primarily me and Candlejack). I figured it would be worth spending a bunch of hours on this initial setup in order to save time long-term.

Now, as you might have gathered, this didn't exactly pan out that way. What happened was that the first person appointed as test lead greatly misjudged the complexity and size of the project and ended up trying for a while and then fading away. Given that I am not able to actually hire and pay someone for this stuff, I felt I couldn't really be pushing too hard to get things done, so it took a while before this was brought to light and I was able to find a more experienced test lead to take on the role.

A new person meant more hours for me to discuss expectations and come up with a functional workflow. The core method we came up with felt like a relatively solid way to work, although being somewhat of a compromise between ease-of-use for both the test and development teams. On the whole, though, the conceptual way to work seemed like a good process. Unfortunately, this new test lead had some real life developments and was also unable to push through with getting the actual work of managing the test team properly. Obviously, real life comes first and again, I'm not hiring people here.

The people who volunteered to be part of the actual test team (also, thank you!), have turned out to mostly be unable to do the actual testing. Partly because there's not a strong enough lead, but also because it's actually pretty boring to do testing in a structured way. It's mostly documentation and repetitive stuff.

The project manager who was chosen to help with structuring what needs to be updated ended up being burned out and essentially leaving the site for the foreseeable future. This also caused a void in that aspect of the project, and the responsibility again fell on my shoulders.

The development effort is still active, primarily because Candlejack is a solid star of a person who pushes through tough, complex stuff and maintains a professional attitude at all times (yes, complaining about bad code design is also professional :) ). I have personally been going through a bit of low-energy and have not been doing what I feel is my share of things. I could blame real life stress, I could blame the pressure of feeling that I need to be spearheading all fronts of the development and testing efforts because I simply can't pay people to do the work. FUMBBL feels like "my project" and thus my responsibility to get things done. The plea for help in December was absolutely genuine and a concentrated effort for me to be able to shed some of the stress of BB2020 in general.

Over the last months, people consistently ask when FUMBBL is going to implement BB2020, and I've maintained "Q1" as the official response. Given that we have roughly three weeks of Q1 remaining, I'm officially saying that Q1 isn't going to happen. At this point, I don't even have a clear picture of what remains to be implemented in the client (and on the website, although that feels to be in a slightly better state).

In the end, it's been a couple of months of me sticking my head in the sand and not having the energy to shoulder all the stress of getting a test team properly running, working on the site code and helping with the FFB client effort. All while hoping that the people who said they wanted to help would find the time and energy in their lives to take a strong lead in their respective roles and push things into action.

I would like to be clear that I absolutely am not angry at the people who offered to help but ended up not being able to act on their offer. I fully understand (and expect) people to prioritize their own real lives and mental health over a volunteer effort for some free game site on the Internet. I am not writing this to blame anyone, nor am I writing this to bring up excuses for why BB2020 isn't here yet. The intent for this post is to give some kind of insight into what's happening and what's not and give an update about BB2020 to point to when people ask. Please please don't be angry with the people who offered to help.

So, what now?

The current state of the test tasks isn't great, and there aren't enough people who are able to work in a structured way to run tests. Expecting an enterprise level test effort was clearly not something I could expect to be pulled off on a free site with volunteers helping out, and something probably needs to change.

There are two critical issues with the current state (not counting the lack of people who can/are able to help here):

1. It's difficult to get an overall idea of what remains to be done. Coming up with an idea of "when it will be done" is virtually impossible and any date estimate is very much going to be a guess at this point.

2. It's difficult for developers (Candlejack and me) to see what to work on next, and plan for how to implement these new features.

Both of these are direct consequences of the lack of project and test management, which is something I should have tackled much much sooner. I've ended up in a place where I put a lot of energy into trying to set up a project structure and not having enough to actually be directly productive and work on the code.

Rather than doing the same thing again (asking for help, appointing people, coming up with workflows), and expecting a different outcome, my plan is to simplify the process primarily for Candlejack and myself. I have to accept the fact that the client will never be fully tested in a structured way. Instead, I have to rely on point testing by us developers, and scattered testing by a small number of individuals. And eventually simply hope for the best. This will cause problems when we go live with BB2020, but I don't see another way forward.

My next step is to take a few days to think over how to shift the bb2020 effort to something more developer friendly, and eventually sit down and structure the numerous sources of things to change into one single place where it can be turned into developer-friendly tasks in a way that's meaningful to myself and Candlejack.

So, what's going to be the official response to "when are we going bb2020"? I'd love to be able to give a realistic estimate, but the truth is that I simply can't know. There are so few people working on actually making it happen that any little change in energy levels will have a huge impact on the project as a whole.

I *want* to be able to say Q2, and I *want* to be able to say "Before BB3 is released". I believe it's possible, but in no way is it certain.

I understand this is disappointing to some of you, but that unfortunately does very little except push more stress on me.

Also, yes, I understand there will be additional follow-up questions regarding this (Box trophy, major tournaments, etc etc). At this point, I don't know. Anything I'd write right now would pretty much be a guess, so I will leave it at that.

As a final note, you don't need to worry about my mental health or my ability to deal with the stress of this. I'd lie if I said it wasn't stressful and that I feel a bit overwhelmed with the size of the project, but I'm not even close to any kind of breakdown. The reason I've been less productive than I in theory could is to not burn myself out and completely lose track of everything. I'm keeping well within my ability to cope with this. :)

The bb2020 effort *is* moving forward, not just at the pace I would have wanted. We'll get there in the end.