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Dash Core Group Q2 2018 Summary Call - 10 August 2018

What I think you are referring to here (and correct me if I'm wrong), is external testing by QA / Testers which is distinct and in which these external tests should be run -- do this and try and get this result, or do that and try and break the software.

You are correct that is exactly what I'm referring to external testing. We use testComplete which is one of the best QA testing software packages we have used. I do not know what your testing requirements are so obviously I cannot recommend it but it might be something to look at. We run hundreds of automated regression tests that we simply would not have the time to do manually. We have tried open source testing software and although it is useful in some applications we found it was never sufficient for our needs, it also took a lot of time to setup. We eventually went for proprietary software that has saved us a considerable amount of time on repetitive tests. The great thing about this software is you don't need coder to use it as it is point and click. However if you have a coder working with it you can make customizations to the tests. https://smartbear.com/product/testcomplete/overview/

A variety of products from different vendors does not necessarily mean that our environment is not integrated.

Yes, I agree however there are integrations and there are seamless information flow integrations. Meaning that the traceability of an issue remains all the way through the development cycle with no manual actions required in setting it up. You mentioned you use Jira and therefore one such software suite which will fully integrate with Jira to give you full traceability is HelixALM by perforce

https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-alm

Thank you Marley for responding to my questions. It is much appreciated!
 
@DeepBlue ,
I'm a simple and straightforward person, so I prefer simple and straightforward communication. Some of your posts contain constructive feedback and I really appreciate them and will consider suggested changes and evaluate some of them. There is a part of your posts that are repeatable complains and I am not going to pretend that they aren't.

I also stand by my opinion about screenshotmonitor.com. I respect your point of view, however I strongly disagree and have the opposite view. You can use this software at your workplace - it is your choice. However at this point in time, there is no force on this planet that would make me spying on my teammates and friends.
I would hate an idea of having such software on my computer (no matter how many great words you would use to describe it) and I am not going to force any of my team members to accept that. We don't intend to hire slaves to work and look at their hands. We want enthusiasts, who would work with us because they want to and they believe in what they are doing - such person doesn't require constant monitoring. If I would have to watch monitors of my teammates, it would mean to me that I have failed as a manager and as a person.


Well... That wasn't short at all ;)

@kot
I'm somewhat surprised to hear what I feel is a more ideological or visceral response to @DeepBlue's suggestion, than a practical one. As @DeepBlue stated, the purpose of this kind of software is a productivity tool, not something that a manager is supposed to spend all their time watching someone work. I completely disagree that being an enthusiast who loves your job means that you are above the need to make use of productivity tools that can not only aid in your confidence when talking about your remote work with your manager, but can also help you learn. There are great coders, who enjoy their work, from great companies, who use tools like this. I am not really looking to have a back-and-forth discussion with you on this, but I just thought I would add my two cents on it for your consideration.
 
I also stand by my opinion about screenshotmonitor.com. I respect your point of view, however I strongly disagree and have the opposite view. You can use this software at your workplace - it is your choice. However at this point in time, there is no force on this planet that would make me spying on my teammates and friends.
I would hate an idea of having such software on my computer (no matter how many great words you would use to describe it) and I am not going to force any of my team members to accept that. We don't intend to hire slaves to work and look at their hands. We want enthusiasts, who would work with us because they want to and they believe in what they are doing - such person doesn't require constant monitoring.

A knife in a criminal's hands can harm. The same knife in a surgeon's hand can save a life. A knife is just a tool. It depends on who, and how it is used.

The world's best athletes have a coach. The coach needs detailed information on an athlete's performance to properly fulfil their job as a coach. The role of a coach is to support, encourage and provide feedback to the athlete on how to improve. Professional athletes actively seek and want that feedback. That is how we use this service. It has never been used to castigate or "spy" on anyone in my organization. Not once.

I trust my staff 100% and they trust me. I don't need this tool in order to trust them.

As for the "slave" comment. My staff laughed at that comment. One of my staff told me working for my enterprise has freed him from his last job and that this is the best job he has ever had. "A "slave" has no options" he said "I have more freedom now than I have ever had, I love my job".

Then I asked if they wanted to turn the service off. The answer was a resounding "no". I asked why and these are the reasons given:
1. We use it to support them and improve their performance.
2. They can see for themselves what parts of a job are taking the time. They can also see which apps, or areas of work are taking the most time and therefore know how to become more efficient.
3. It reduces administration times.
4. Problem areas can be analysed and we can see they are working on it without them having to give explanations to management.

Our team have hugely increased performance with this tool and nobody I spoke to has an objection to use it, in fact quite the opposite.

I understand you don't agree with me and therefore we will just have to agree to differ on this point. I respect your point of view also.
 
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Core - read my questions, read the questions from @DeepBlue, pull your finger out and be transparent....

I wonder what some of the leadership team do all day long? doesnt seem like anything of substance is being achieved....

The Whats going on with Dash reports is now a copy/paste job of getting bank accounts, typing the same reports month after month....not good enough.

By the way, Evolution had better be here in 2018...


LMFAO


/popcorn

My oh my... so many new problems, yet so many of the same ones.....
 
LMFAO


/popcorn

My oh my... so many new problems, yet so many of the same ones.....

So, you are THE "TheDashGuy" with the colorful history with the Dash community? Not necessarily a bad thing per se, but you know how people spoof other people's identity and so on. Just checking.
 
Still waiting for my question to be answered. I'll paste it again to save you going back...

----------------------------------------------

Regarding PDF of 24 July 2018, "What's Going on at Dash?"

Where is the DIP for blockchain users, referenced under DAPI?

Namespace specifications ("blockchain users") represents a significant and lasting development. This, therefore, should be explained to, and approved by, masternodes.
 
Dear Community Members,

Please find the answers, we have managed to collect so far:

Q: Follow up on the first one: Who is the best person (and by which medium) to contact for the following purposes: general developer questions, business integrations (may require discussion of fiat conversion options, legal/accounting, etc.), and technical integrations (how to technically integrate Dash, InstantSend, PrivateSend, etc., purely technical)? What is the estimated turnaround time for each?
A: The best method to get support is to contact [email protected]. Estimated turnaround time is 2 business days.

Q: Several installments of "what's going on in Dash?" have alluded to some business integrations being placed on hold due to limited funding. Understanding confidentiality and redaction of sensitive information, has Business Development explored the possibility of separately funding specific integration arrangements, whether via separate treasury proposals, DashBoost proposals, or community crowdfunds?
A: Answered by Glenn Austin, CFO in the quarterly call, Q3 plans.

Q: Have critical price levels over the span of specific timeframes been identified that would be expected to have an immediate impact on DCG's operations due to insufficient funding? Is there a contingency plan for further unforeseen contractions in the market beyond the temporary buffer that is currently in place? Do MNOs have reason to be concerned about the continuation of DCG in its current state in the event of this bleak scenario actually taking place?
A: Answered by Glenn CFO in quarterly call.

Q: What is the status of the website refresh?
A: Answered by Fernando, CMO in quarterly call

Q: What is the status of the "massively overhauled" PrivateSend featuring "vastly reduced tx sizes" promised one year ago at https://www.reddit.com/r/dashpay/co...oadmap_through_evolution_and_beyond/dhfv29r/?
A: This was not promised or shared by anyone at DCG and I don’t even think we should be entertaining this question (Nathan). The person who did promise this also explained as much in the forum thread, although it wasn’t answered by DCG.

Q: Does the Dash Core Team have specific plans to attack the remittance market in Venezuela (or India, or anywhere), or would they prefer to see that come up independently through the proposal process?
A: Answered by Brad, Head of Business Development in the quarterly call, strategy and Q3 plans sections.

Q: Progress on the FanDuel partnership? When can we expect Dash to be usable on FanDuel?
A: FanDuel is not a DCG partnership. Please direct questions to Scott Farnsworth of DEMO Incubator Inc.

Q: Are there any updates from Dash Labs forthcoming and if so what are they?
A: Dash Labs is managed by Evan Duffield, and any updates on their work will be released by Evan directly.

Q: What is ASU currently researching and when can we expect more insights into scaling, block propagation, optimum node count etc.?
A: Answered by Darren, Research lead in quarterly call

Q: Can the Whats going on at Dash reports please be uploaded to a platform which can be accessed by everyone (i.e. Medium or Dash blog), not just in the forums. This has been asked many times but never actioned.
A: Yes. We already made the links accessible by anyone. So, the problem no longer exists. Additionally, we will be transitioning to a text version.

Q: There has not been any significant or major integrations or Exchange additions for a VERY long time. Can the core team explain if they are actively pursuing these opportunities? or only when they are presented to them?
A: Answered by Brad, Head of Business Development in the quarterly call.
Adjectives are subjective. We know DCG needs to get better at communication. We think Business Development is doing a good job on integrations. We consider Bitgo a major integration. And we are excited about upcoming partnerships we are working on. We cannot comment on specific ongoing business development discussions with potential partners. We will continue to announce these via PR releases, and we also are exploring other ways to provide more information to the community.

Q: How big is the current remaining marketing budget? What does core plan to achieve with these funds and over which timeframe do you plan to spend these funds?
A: For more details around the remaining marketing budget please refer to Fernando’s post from August 2018: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/advertising-proposals.40044/

Q: The dash treasury is currently under significant pressure. While Core is building significant buffers other important Dash businesses stand to go bankrupt. It is currently unclear if MNOs prefer Core having unused marketing funds over continuing other activities. Depending on your answer I might put in a proposal to request DCG to redistribute marketing funds to the highest ranked, unfunded and above 10% treasury proposals of the current cycle. Would you follow such instruction by the masternode community?
A: We welcome the dialogue on finding ways to relieve budget pressure. We are currently exploring options to increase our flexibility with unused funds; however, we have already made some existing commitments for a portion of the funds and will be seeking to reallocate unused advertising funding to cover certain business development activities. Please refer to the following link for more information regarding the marketing budget: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/advertising-proposals.40044/

Q: How do the core groups expenses vs deliverables compare to industry averages?
A: When you find a benchmark study, please let us know!

Q: Here are some questions regarding the core funding for salaries that have not yet been answered by Glenn Austin and which I posted in a thread regarding the core compensation here: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/core-team-compensation-september.39897/
A:
- Development - 30 staff
- Leadership and Admin - 10 staff
- Project Management - 4 staff
- Strategy - 4 staff
- Quality Assurance - 4 staff
- Business Development - 3 staff
- Marketing - 3 staff
- Infrastructure - 2 staff
- Support - 1 staff
- Human Resources - 1 staff
- International Outreach - 8 staff (part-time)
Leadership and Admin - can you be more specific about you mean. Leadership of what? Admin for what? How many are leadership and how many are admin and what specifically are their roles?
Project management - for what? Is this project management for core development? Core marketing? Core business development? What?
Strategy - 4 staff. Strategy for what exactly? Development? Marketing? Business Development? Are the Strategy people working full time on strategy? That seems a lot - what exactly are these people doing?
Marketing: What has marketing specifically achieved with our 1200 DASH funds on the last marketing funding? What projects exactly are marketing working on? How is that funding being used? What are the proposed strategies for marketing? What role does core Marketing have with Wachsman PR?
How much money is going to each function of core e.g. for Marketing? Development? Project management etc. Provide a breakdown of funds for each.
How do each of the individual roles of core interact with each other, what are the dependencies of one function of core compared to another function of core. We need to know this so that we can determine what would happen if we wanted to replace or improve a function of core and what the knock on effects would have.
International outreach - where are these people situated? What are they doing? How much money are they receiving? How is compensation calculated for each of these people? When they say part time how much time is being spent? Is compensation calculate on an hourly rate? What criteria determine the amount of funding for each outreach person? What have the outreach people achieved? How is ROI determined on these outreach projects. Who does outreach report to in core? Who co-ordinates their activities?
Business development. What have their achieved since Bradley Zastrow took over? What inroads have been made and what direction is business development going specifically? What new and future business partnerships are planned that they can disclose? If they cannot disclose details can they disclose generic details so we have enough information to determine the efficiency of this team?
Are core prepared to split up each core function into separate funding proposals so that we can better ask focused questions regarding that function? If not why not?
There was mention of "benefits" being given out to core. How much in benefits to each person? What are these benefits and how much will these benefits be worth per year?
NOTE: These questions were all answered in the August compensation proposal comments on Dash Forum: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/core-team-compensation-september.39897/

Q: On Dash Ventures: What would be the amount estimated in $ for the first initial contribution? When could it be operational? What would be the requirements and characteristics to access it? What criteria and how would decisions be made where to invest?
A: CEO provided update in quarterly call, and on recent episode of Dash Force News. It’s in the works, details are not finalized, and we don’t have an estimation of how long it will take to finalize the legal review. Could be a few weeks, could be 6 months.


Please note that some of the questions related to technical developments remain unanswered (except those already answered by Nathan). This is due to the fact that during last two weeks, Bob, Andy and developers were having on-site workshops and were working together on Evolution development and solutioning. The remaining questions will be answered as soon as possible.

Thank you
Robert
 
After the situation with Ogilvy and T+C logos, can core please start sharing UX work via Invision - I've seen you use this internally, why not share these to the public? As a designer a fair while ago now, I know all the issues with 'too many chefs' but we really don't want to go too far down the line design wise without feedback and it may help to communicate with the DAO visually.

Further to this, Fernando has mentioned the new website will be by Kisslabs (https://www.kisslabs.ch/en/) - this is concerning from a UX perspective. Please can you share some more on this.

We would love to get some design feedback along the way, but sharing the Invision links openly would probably be too chaotic. I have already discussed this with a few MNOs and I don't see an efficient way to do it. Ideas welcomed!

Also, it is not that Kisslabs (I would also be concerned!). The correct one is this:
http://kisslabs.co.nz/
 
We would love to get some design feedback along the way, but sharing the Invision links openly would probably be too chaotic. I have already discussed this with a few MNOs and I don't see an efficient way to do it. Ideas welcomed!

Also, it is not that Kisslabs (I would also be concerned!). The correct one is this:
http://kisslabs.co.nz/

Amazing, my misunderstanding I think someone had said they were Swiss. They look great and I've heard good things so looking forward to the first showcase.
 
Hello Fellow Community Members,
We have collected answers for the remaining questions (probably there might be others, I am not aware of).
Thank you very much @bob, @AndyDark and @nmarley for your answers and help.

Q: Several third party services and companies have commented that Dash's developers were some of the most difficult to get a hold of in the cryptocurrency space. Why is this, and what is planned to remedy the situation?
  • BC: Despite their primary responsibility to develop product, the developers at Dash are quite accessible through public communication channels. The Dash website provides e-mail addresses and DashForum names for our entire team as we expect to interact regularly with the Dash community. If specific team members are not responsive, feel free to reach out to their management staff to help get the question to the right place. Nathan ([email protected]) or Bob ([email protected]) are available to help.
  • AF: Developers in Dash Core Group are generally focused on code and innovation and communication with 3rd party services and companies is generally filtered by business development and integration teams. If there are specific services and companies that are not able to gain communication then they should contact our management team or BizDev team.

Q: Is the Dash Privacy Roadmap still valid in light of the crackdown on anonymous crypto currency in Japan, etc? Specifically, is the reporting at https://www.dashforcenews.com/dashs-privacy-roadmap-evolution-beyond/ still accurate in terms of the "Cash" feature of Evolution?
  • BC: Yes, Cash accounts / privacy function are still within the Evolution design roadmap. After our MVP protocol launch, we will work on improved privacy using technologies like BLS signatures.

Q: Will the updates to Dash this year allow the software to create sub assets?
  • BC: No. The initial use cases for our MVP release of Evolution have not required tokenization. This will be possible via DAPs at a later time.
  • AF: Tokenization will be possible in DAPs later but this is not being implemented for MVP as the usecases we are working for do not require it

Q: Now that bitcoin cash has announced it will pursue colored coin tech, will this have an impact on Dash’s competitive advantage?
  • AF: Colored coin tech is in many ways a predecessor to Evolution platform design. Using a Layer 2, we decouple the need to color coins by adding new ways to integrate data to the Dash blockchain that don’t require trying to squeeze colored coin functions into ledger transactions, which is an inefficient and hacky approach compared to how Evolution works

Q: Regarding PDF of 24 July 2018, "What's Going on at Dash?" Where is the DIP for blockchain users, referenced under DAPI? Namespace specifications ("blockchain users") represents a significant and lasting development. This, therefore, should be explained to, and approved by, masternodes.
  • BC: We were pleased to publish DIP 5 - Blockchain Users on August 28th. Username based functionality is the foundation of Evolution design and blockchain users is the implementation of that vision. https://github.com/dashpay/dips/blob/master/dip-0005.md
  • AF: Username based functionality has been the foundation of Evolution design since Evan announced it and gained approval via funding from the network. Blockchain users is the implementation of that vision and is one of the cornerstones of Evolution, so we are happy this has been explained and approved already

Q: One issue that has not however been addressed yet is the release of the coding activity stats for the private GIThub repositories for the development of DASH code. These coding activity reports are used by investors as a valuable key performance indicator that DASH is being actively developed. At the moment the private repositories coding statistics are being kept private and therefore the coding activity reports are showing very low coding activity, which is not good for investor confidence! I've requested several times in this proposal for the private repository coding activity stats for DASH development at the Github to be released so that investors can see that DASH is being actively developed with high coding activity. Why isn't this information not being released?
  • BC: Private repositories are not our preferred method for working on source code within Dash. However, for sound business reasons we have some of our project work within private repositories. These repositories will eventually become public at which time the activity will be visible. Although this may temporarily be a concern to some members of the community, we are confident in the quality and quantity of work being performed by the team. We remain focused on the development of innovative features which will bring value to the network.
  • AF: In Dash we do not chase statistics such as lines of code and commit count, rather innovation of features and value to the network. Focusing on vanity-metrics is not a measure of our performance.
  • NM: There are no statistics being “kept private” -- the statistics which are available would be of no use to anyone, as they only track the default (e.g. “master”) Git branch at any rate. We develop using a different workflow (git-flow, merging mainly to a “develop” branch), so this doesn’t allow for accurate statistics gathering using GitHub’s available tools.
 
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Blockchain users has been explained and approved? Do you mean this in a broad sense, or do you mean DIP 5 will not be modified? I have tried to provide constructive feedback to DIP 5 and have not yet seen a response to it. If there is acceptance or objection to my proposal, I would like to see it before DIP 5 goes ahead. Thanks.
 
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