Cutting features for the first release of Squirrel Clock

There are a lot of features you would want to see in an employee Attendance tracking software, but like almost everything features also follow the Pareto principle (also known as the 20/80 rule), 20% of the features will give you 80% of the benefits.

Now, you really want to get the software release as soon as possible and start getting people to use the system and give you real feedback on how real customers use the system (as opposed to the "made up" customer you develop for) - and of course to also get those customer's money so you can keep the servers running, pay your mortgage and feed your family.

The only way to release the software earlier to to cut features, really identify those essential 20% of features - and only do half of those.

For Squirrel Clock, in the initial version there will be two access levels - employee and supervisor.

An employee will be able to check in, check out and manually enter and update his or her work time info (in yesterday's post I wrote about how this will all be in one page).

A supervisor can do anything an employee can do and can also update other employee's data, review manual changes made by other employees, add/ update/ remove employees and generate reports.

There will also be a "time clock interface", that can be used on a computer near the door when all employees can check in/out that also doubled as an in/out board.

Tracking time off (vacations and sick days) is an example of a critical feature that Squirrel Clock must have - and I'm not sure will be ready for the November 2010 release - I may have to release without it and add it in an update soon after the initial version.

By the way, you may have noticed that for this entire post I didn't write you can register to be notified when Squirrel Clock is released (and get a nice discount too).