I am an artist
|
Posted by geekling // Sun, Jan 8, 2006 4:47 PM
I was wondering what some of the Microsoft employees (yeah, I know you guys are here) thought about more frequent release cycles with fewer features in these releases.
This is something I notice freeware and small indy software developers do often: over the course of a year they might make six or seven new updates. Each release is stable, and has maybe a handful of bugfixes and a handful of features are added. Its nothing epic mind you, but it is a lot better than having to wait years -- YEARS -- for new stuff. 
Jim Hugunin, developer of IronPython, has promised steady releases of the software product even after its reached its 1.0 release. This is the kind of stuff I like to see happen at Microsoft.
Do you think big releases with lots of features and bugfixes are better than smaller, but more rapid, releases?
|
|
It probably has to do with the size of the business producing the product.
With multiple teams involved in each release at places like Microsoft, the impetus and momentum of the overall release seems to help coordinate the combination of efforts that make up a release. That being said, it can only be produced as fast as its slowest team, so they have learned to be patient and pace their releases. That would be my guess, anyway.
|
I would think that if the devs focused on releasing smaller releases, the actual product would take longer to release because devs wouldn't be focussing much on improving the code or adding new features, but rather quickly and efficiently stablizing code to be released the next week.
|
 | mVPstar wrote:
I would think that if the devs focused on releasing smaller releases, the actual product would take longer to release because devs wouldn't be focussing much on improving the code or adding new features, but rather quickly and efficiently stablizing code to be released the next week. |
Whoa, I don't mean /that/ fast.
|
How fast then?
Months? Aren't CTPs doing the job?
|
Once every couple of months, once every six months -- whatever is acceptable, depending on the product type.
CTPs are Community Technology Previews. I believe they're beta-quality previews of software that hasn't shipped yet.
I'm talking about minor point releases for software that's already shipped. Like, let's take VS2005: I've been told its got quite a few bugs. Focus on fixing some bugs, ship an update in two-three months. Yadda yadda, stuff like that.
|
I'm not really arguing that they *should* do that, I'm just curious if they've ever thought about it, etc, etc.
|
| geekling wrote:
Do you think big releases with lots of features and bugfixes are better than smaller, but more rapid, releases?
|
It would require a culture change at Microsoft in more ways than one.
One of the things that Microsoft is utterly notorious for is only providing decent support for the latest, greatest version. The problem is, this is not just for small things like utilities but they'll pull off the same thing with huge elements that effect everything such as demanding people upgrade every one of their servers in an Active Directory to Windows 2003 SP1 from Windows 2000 before providing decent support.
Ultimately, their updates can only really be at the speed that their customers can handle. And that, ultimately, is really quite slow. Especially for businesses.
|
|
|