Friday, October 29, 2004

Really, release as soon as  possible? It is recommended to always "release as soon as it is possible" where this is taken to mean early and often. My reply is to release ASAP, but no sooner. To be my usual tiresome self i would like to interject a little "it depends" here. Define an ideal and come up with a rubric for pattern variation. These absolute rules always frustrate me because it does depend. The ideal is release as often and soon as possible. What that means in each context is something different. For example, in one of my favorite projects i was working on a large internal web site that had over 100 simultaneous active heavy users. It used perl and CGI so i made live changes continually. There was never a real release of anything. This worked 99% of the time and it was exciting. Training was an issue and i tried not to break features, but that's not always possible or even desirable. You can't make stuff better if you can't break it. On another project each release cost millions of dollars because an entire nationwide network had to be upgraded and we could cut all data traffic in large regions of north America. This customer treated each release like a nuclear attack so releases were infrequent to say the least. Yet other customers in a similar situation didn't care and wanted releases much faster. On another project the software was more your traditional enterprise software that was installed using installshield or whatever. Typically everyone was always very busy so releases were more of an annoyance to them. comment[] 11:45:45 AM

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