Realistic Delivery Date - An Intelligent Guess

Many good folks in this community are now reporting bugs with the new Dolphin 7. They are doing a commendable job of testing and reviewing it--all for free because of their passion for this fine software.

After reviewing some of the bugs being reported, I got to thinking. Wouldn't it be great if the community could intelligently guess at a realistic date of delivery for the official Dolphin 7, based on the bugs being reported and our combined experiences fixing similar bugs?

By tracking the kinds of bugs and what we estimate the fixes could take in hours or days, we could sum up all this and come up with what we think would be a resonable date of delivery.

We could categorize these "bugs" into some very simple categories. For these simple categories some of us developers could assign a delivery timeframe in hours or days. By counting how many bugs fall into these categories and then multiplying by the hours/days and summing, we could estimate a date.

Based on the bugs I have been reading about, these are the categories I suggest:

1. Critical - these bugs are show stoppers and Dolphin could not be released without fixing these types of bugs.

2. Tolerable - these bugs are not disruptive, but rather annoying. Dolphin could be released with these in place, but would need to be fixed eventually to keep everyone happy.

3. Desirable - these are not really bugs, but rather things that are missing or that would be nice to have. Many of the "glamorous" features that Boonex is promising would fit this category.

I know this is crazy, but let's see how the community responds. Is anyone up for the challenge? Perhaps someone has experience doing this sort of timeframe estimation.

In the absence of a specific delivery date or a "hopeful" date, what does the community think would be a better date of delivery?

Someone tell me to shut up or to "let's roll and see what we come up with". Regardless, this community is really awesome and has some great thinkers.