In this Shelley Incentivized Testnet Development Update video series, Project Manager Dimitris Poulopoulos will be taking you through the updates on a regular basis:
For those of you who like to read, here’s a script of the video 
In this Shelley Incentivized Testnet Development Update video series, Project Manager Dimitris Poulopoulos will be taking you through the updates on a regular basis.
Hi everyone. It is Dimitris again, project manager for the Shelley Incentivized Testnet. Back for another week to share a quick update on ITN progress.
Thanks for your further feedback on these weekly video updates, it’s been great to see the continued level of engagement.
We will keep providing these updates weekly to keep you up to speed with all the work we’re doing, all the learnings and the improvements we’re making to the testnet.
We’re also going to start sharing with you some of the results of the community and stake pool operator surveys we’ve been doing. It’s been very useful feedback which, along with some of the platform metrics we’ve been collecting, is helping us develop and improve the testnet and continue planning the journey to mainnet.
Recap
Network stability still remains our number one priority. We have seen some improvements since we pushed out 0.8.9 with uptime increasing to over 90%.
This week
This week, we decided to forego the regular Wednesday update of Jormungandr on the Incentivized Testnet. Instead, we’ll do a bundled release next week, with new versions of Jormungandr, Daedalus and the Wallet BE. Together, we hope this will continue to improve the experience for both stake pool operators and ADA holders.
Our focus since Christmas has been on network performance. We have seen improvements here for stake pool operators since 0.8.9. Now that the core network is stabilizing we have also decided to increase the number of connections allowed from peers without reachable IP addresses. This should help syncing issues that some of you have experienced with Daedalus.
Coming next week
Next week’s Jormungandr release will contain two weeks worth of work, so will be a significant release. In it, we hope to bring improvements in chain selection and quality and it should help with forking issues. We are developing a framework for chain metrics which will articulate branch selection logic. We are improving logging in a substantial way so decisions relating to forks are better understood. We have isolated some code that creates loops in the node leading to CPU spikes. We are working to reduce the occurrences of CPU spikes.
We wanted to improve the network experience before pushing out a new version of Daedalus, which was last updated just before Christmas. Combining the new node, wallet BE and Daedalus updates should go some way towards improving the overall user experience. The new Daedalus will also include a number of UI and feature enhancements too, and more on those next week.
Syncing and connection related tickets comprise the majority of tickets received by our support team. As we continue to enhance the network there should be a reduction in these incidents. For users who are awaiting a fix, tickets are placed in on-hold status, contributing to our backlog. If you are waiting on a resolution to a syncing or connection related issue, you can expect an update from the IOHK Technical Support Desk in the coming days.
I hope you found this short update useful.
I’ll be back next week with the full rundown. Thank you for watching and I’ll catch you soon