Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/05/14
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I was one of those non-SW types that was in management. The engineers that worked in my company would hem and haw over releases, dates, quality, etc. All good things to worry about. It was my job to set release dates, and organize the engineers to think about marketing issues rather than perfection of code. In the end, we established dates for release in advance. They did not change for initial release. Sometimes features were removed to meet dates, but the date was inviolate. A second date was the first update to the initial release ( V1.1). The date for this was 30 days after the initial release. It also was inviolate. Sounds rough? Not really. Initial release meets market needs dates. You have competitors, If you do not release to schedule, you lose what is essentially the entire market for that customer. V1.1 allows some time to make the always necessary bug fixes, and so that the customer base understood that you were committed to fixing and adding features that they had need for. It actually worked pretty well. ( I should add that this was for PC code, and especially for Video drivers in a PC. Not exactly bank account accounting SW. It was mission critical, but not life or business threatening.) The idea of counting the number of releases sounds gameable to me..... If you want to improve, you just release less number of releases, more farther spread out in time. Frank Filippone red735i@earthlink.net