agile.brazism

Posts tagged with "releases"

At the core, every browser has some type of release cycle for every build,” Hachamovitch said. “Some of the projects do nightly releases, others don’t. The goal of any prerelease offering is to have a meaningful feedback loop. The value to website developers of having all these drops to keep testing creates some fatigue for them because they keep testing this stream of drops. We’re trying to balance the number of drops to just meaningful drops.

Microsoft’s Problematic Lack Of Nightly Builds For IE

Really interesting insight into Microsoft’s development cycles for Internet Explorer in an article over at Ars Technica.

It makes me wonder what obstacles Microsoft’s IE Team has that prevents it from making quicker releases and getting crucial feedback from developers so that Microsoft can deliver “…what developers really want in their browser”. Without that frequent release cycle, how else do you get that feedback?

It’s an interesting contrast with, say, the SQL Server team or some of the other developer tools teams, where the CTP is the rule, and getting releases in front of users quicker is the name of the game. How much before the official release of SQL Server 2008 did Microsoft start selling licenses to run CTP builds of SQL Server in a production environment?

And, I’m willing to admit that maybe they really do have those frequent release cycles internally; heck, I know we’re releasing things internally long, long before a customer ever sees them. That doesn’t mean I agree with it, though.

Posted on Friday 20 November and comments.

The problem with chasing the dream too long is that you end up without the resources to change direction when a PFA comes true. The MVP is intended to counter this tendency. The process of working backward from the assumption to the least possible investment to validate the assumption saves resources in the case of difficulties and keeps the business on the path of learning.

Three Rivers Institute » Blog Archive » Approaching a Minimum Viable Product (emphasis mine)

Isn’t learning one of the core benefits of Agile development? Closer contacts with customers, to learn what they want, how they work. Shorter release cycles to get more frequent, validating feedback, to learn whether your product is on the right track.

Watching our team struggle with that validation, seeing a backlog of items sit unreleased so that the product can be released “as a whole collection of features” is really hard. Our Agile team has hit a waterfall product release schedule, and it affects morale on the team so quickly.

It’s frustrating, but changing the traditional “a product is this collection of features, and the next upgrade *has to* add these new features” mindset is proving very, very difficult.

Posted on Friday 7 August and comments.

mvp increments releases feedback