Release of FTM 2017 Put On Hold

Post date: Apr 5, 2017 12:49:21 AM

Family Tree Maker 2017 (FTM 2017) will not be released today (see earlier story here). The new release date is now predicted by Software MacKiev to be sometime between Friday evening (or Saturday, depending on where in the world you are), or sometime toward the middle of next week. They posted this new plan and an explanation for the delay at 16:30 Utah time (see below).

UPDATE - 4:30 PM UTAH TIME - APRIL 4

ANCESTRY ASKS TO PUT THE COUNTDOWN ON HOLD

Ancestry have provided the results of the stress testing of FTM 2017 with their servers, and they were not what was expected. When simulating scaling to large numbers of users simultaneously syncing their trees, Ancestry saw a degradation in performance that would affect not only the speed of syncing, but the experience for users of Ancestry.com itself and the Ancestry apps.

ACTION PLAN

Given this, we have agreed a number of steps we will take together:

• We are preparing for synchronized testing with an expanded group of beta testers who will try syncing all at once during a particular 1-2 hour period to evaluate the impact with real user trees. We are arranging to have all the testers connected by a central SMS messaging system so that we can have them cancel syncing if problems arise.

• Ancestry will be taking a look at their gateway and other services to see if they can scale up capacity in a few areas to handle greater load. The goal will be to have a greater buffer when, as expected, a large number of FTM users will try out the system all at once.

• Depending on where we are when ready to launch, we may consider a plan where we do a staggered release to prevent a situation where all users start syncing all at once as they start up FTM 2017 for the first time. We will be reaching out to those getting the new edition to find out who is eager to get started and who'd prefer that others test the system first.

• Ancestry will continue to keep all connection services other than syncing on until FTM 2017 is released. That means that Ancestry hints, search, merge, maps and the Web dashboard will continue to work as they do now. We hope that this will allow most of you to continue your research while waiting for syncing to resume.

ABOUT TIMING

We are looking to conduct the synchronized beta testing tomorrow or Thursday. When that’s complete, and Ancestry has finished whatever short-term engineering adjustments are possible, we will have a much better idea of when we’ll be launching. We believe that ranges from this Friday evening at the earliest to the middle of next week. I’m sorry we can’t provide a better forecast then that.

This is precisely what I had anticipated when I wrote the following:

"I have not been very impressed by the way that this upcoming transition from TreeSync to FamilySync is being handled. My personal feeling is that the lack of advance warning combined with the lack of parallel operation, what appears to be an inadequately tested product and lacking customer support is a recipe for disaster."

I am not trying to create some sort of controversy (I really don't need to anyway, just read the comments on Ancestry's blog). I have been critical of this entire process because the problems with this release have not been caused by unforeseen technical problems. Rather, they are a direct result of a rushed release, poor planning, and a lack of testing. I don't know that the entire fault lies with Software MacKiev, and I certainly feel that Ancestry may have been able to have done more to protect their customers from this situation (like turning TreeSync back on while these problems are being ironed out).

My perspective on this issue, and my reason for fearing the worst, comes from my many years of experience in a technology industry, running a global real-time financial information company (view my LinkedIn profile here). In that role, I was ultimately responsible for many (many) software and systems releases over the years. I could see what was likely to happen in this case, and I set out to warn people who rely on FTM for their research and for maintaining the results of their research. I also warned Ancestry and MacKiev.

I would love to see MacKiev succeed, as it would make my life and my job much easier. Let's hope that this delay will be the last one, and they wait until they have a stable build before the release.

Let us also hope that Ancestry will wait until the end of the "staggered release" before they switch off the "hints, search, merge, maps and the Web dashboard" to previous versions of FTM.