We are busy writing code. At some point we will make a test system public, I think, but Jaguar will decide that. I think Jaguar will try to give weekly updates on development.
Once code is more stable I think the plan is to put it in our public github repository.
Does it mean that NEM will start with testnet (fake coins) before the official NEM release.
If so I think this is a better approach to start with testnet so the community can
test the software and the network performance and some bugs and flaws could be
removed before the official launch.
We could expect that at launch the network will be heavily attacked by DDOS
as in the latest few months it happened to to other alt coins as well
(NXT , eMunie ) forums, websites, network were attacked around important date
announcements.