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Software philosophy: Release early, release often vs polished releases

blog.mugunthkumar.com

21–26 of 26 posts

Re: Software philosophy: Release early, release often vs polished releases

#21

Another week, another false dichotomy article on HN. If there's an inverse correlation between the speed of deployment and the quality of your software, you're doing it wrong. The Continuous Delivery philosophy is borrowed from Lean Manufacturing, and a fundamental tenet of that movement is "Build Quality In." In fact Lean is nearly synonymous with TQM, or Total Quality Management. If you've separated the two, then y…

Some good points, but (there's always a "but" :-) as with most of these, let's call them modern processes (maybe not even that modern if you consider what the likes of Peter DeGrace were saying back in 1990), continuous delivery forces an engineering paradigm onto the (often unwilling) user. What does the constant barrage of (for example) iTunes or Flash updates do to the user's perception of quality? What is the imp…

Yeah this is a good point, and that's a balance I'm actually in the process of determining for my current project.

User expectations are different for mobile apps -- anecdotally it seems users not as annoyed by mobile app updates as they would be for Flash or even Word, because the process is a lot lighter and less painful. For web applications it's transparent to the end user.

But, yes for rich client apps it's a concern. I think the trick is to deliver features rather than bug fixes and shape user expectations towards getting something new from an update rather than getting nothing but fixes that should have been in place to begin with.

Re: Software philosophy: Release early, release often vs polished releases

#22
post #19

Another week, another false dichotomy article on HN. If there's an inverse correlation between the speed of deployment and the quality of your software, you're doing it wrong. The Continuous Delivery philosophy is borrowed from Lean Manufacturing, and a fundamental tenet of that movement is "Build Quality In." In fact Lean is nearly synonymous with TQM, or Total Quality Management. If you've separated the two, then y…

I thought the continuous delivery book was written by Jez Humble and David Farley. Fowler provides a foreword for it http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321601912?tag=contindelive... . Other than that I totally agree with you comments - Lean Continuous and Agile are not orthogonal to Quality.

You're right, sorry. It's in the "Martin Fowler" Addison Wesley series of books, it's not written by Fowler. I've had the book on my shelf and read a good bit of it, and should have caught that!

"Martin Fowler" is on the cover in two different places, plus it looks just like the cover of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, which he did write, so I've had that misconception in my brain for a while. Failure to test assumptions...

Re: Software philosophy: Release early, release often vs polished releases

#23
post #16

Another week, another false dichotomy article on HN. If there's an inverse correlation between the speed of deployment and the quality of your software, you're doing it wrong. The Continuous Delivery philosophy is borrowed from Lean Manufacturing, and a fundamental tenet of that movement is "Build Quality In." In fact Lean is nearly synonymous with TQM, or Total Quality Management. If you've separated the two, then y…

Can you point to any examples of high quality software products created using the methodologies you mention?

Etsy has done some excellent work on Continuous Deployment systems, so I assume they are using this...

Re: Software philosophy: Release early, release often vs polished releases

#24
post #8

Expectations from software are lower than other products like cars, televisions. A car breaking down in the middle of a drive to work is far more "severe" an incident than Internet Explorer hanging and crashing. Further, software engineering as a field is very very young, with a far lower barrier to entry, resulting in products and processes which are much less evolved and mature compared to other industries. I think…

"[O]ther products like cars, televisions" include embedded control software.

Re: Software philosophy: Release early, release often vs polished releases

#25
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the continuous delivery book was written by Jez Humble and David Farley. Fowler provides a foreword for it http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321601912?tag=contindelive... . Other than that I totally agree with you comments - Lean Continuous and Agile are not orthogonal to Quality.

You're right, sorry. It's in the "Martin Fowler" Addison Wesley series of books, it's not written by Fowler. I've had the book on my shelf and read a good bit of it, and should have caught that! "Martin Fowler" is on the cover in two different places, plus it looks just like the cover of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, which he did write, so I've had that misconception in my brain for a while. Failur…

Easy mistake to make. I believe Jez works for ThoughtWorks too and I'm guessing Fowler had some input in the idea.

Re: Software philosophy: Release early, release often vs polished releases

#26
post #13

The Release Early/Often example describes a situation of releasing a product that does not have all the features of its competitors: "The Windows Operating System, in the initial version (1.0) did not support overlapping windows which was a breakthrough feature on the then contemporary Macintosh." Identically, the Polished Release example also describes a situation of releasing a product that does not have all the fe…

His example outside of software[1] is not the best either. Movies do have "versions", they are called cuts; an example of multiple published cuts for a movie is Blade Runner.

[1]> Every single release of a movie, whether it is The Jurassic Park and its sequels or The Matrix and its sequels or Steve Jobs’s own Toy Story and its sequels never had "versions".

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