You Release Late and Infrequently
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You Release Late and Infrequently
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: You Release Late and Infrequently
#2On frequent releases: I absolutely love that there's a new interface tweak almost every time I login to my GitHub account.
Re: You Release Late and Infrequently
#3Wikipedia has links that go nowhere.
But it does still sound a bit dodgey, I think because to get accurate feedback, you necessarily need to fool people. For example, if you had a link that stated it was a proposed feature, it would affect the clickrate. Or maybe it wouldn't? Maybe interest would be enough. Perhaps this could be experimentally tested.
Re: You Release Late and Infrequently
#4On frequent releases: I absolutely love that there's a new interface tweak almost every time I login to my GitHub account.
yea, although a couple of the tweaks have ended up tweaking me out when i can't find something. :-)
Re: You Release Late and Infrequently
#5Just this weekend I watched Machinima.com's documentary series on the history of Valve Software:
http://www.machinima.com/film/view&id=42271
One of the common themes in the series is Valve's frequent choice to delay shipping in order to get things right. Gabe Newell says something like, "Your software is late for a while, but it's bad forever." As far as I can tell, this has worked extremely well for them.
Which makes me wonder what the difference is between Valve's games and Gmail. I think it has something to do with their games being about experiential storytelling, and Gmail is a tool to accomplish tasks. I imagine most software falls somewhere on a spectrum between the "tool" and "experience" endpoints and I wonder if other software besides games might be hurt more than helped by "release early and often."
Re: You Release Late and Infrequently
#6Just this weekend I watched Machinima.com's documentary series on the history of Valve Software: http://www.machinima.com/film/view&id=42271 One of the common themes in the series is Valve's frequent choice to delay shipping in order to get things right. Gabe Newell says something like, "Your software is late for a while, but it's bad forever." As far as I can tell, this has worked extremely well for them. Which make…
The difference is that valve's software has to have a build installed on the client's computer or worse, a disk you shove into a console.
On the web, your releases update 100% of your client base instantly.
Though I do agree that depending on your market, "release early and often" can hurt you. Getting a bad reputation early can be hard to shrug off later.
Re: You Release Late and Infrequently
#7Just this weekend I watched Machinima.com's documentary series on the history of Valve Software: http://www.machinima.com/film/view&id=42271 One of the common themes in the series is Valve's frequent choice to delay shipping in order to get things right. Gabe Newell says something like, "Your software is late for a while, but it's bad forever." As far as I can tell, this has worked extremely well for them. Which make…
The difference is that valve's software has to have a build installed on the client's computer or worse, a disk you shove into a console. On the web, your releases update 100% of your client base instantly. Though I do agree that depending on your market, "release early and often" can hurt you. Getting a bad reputation early can be hard to shrug off later.
Yes, one part is the ease of productionizing for the web.
That said, I think there are always techniques for using the early, often, listen approach with private betas, multivariate testing, etc.
Release doesn't necessarily mean releasing to the public, and does not even necessarily mean releasing something user facing.
Re: You Release Late and Infrequently
#8The Wufoo example is awful. Shouldn't have taken more than 5 min for them to realize, "HEY the Flash experience on GNU/Linux sucks! Maybe we shouldn't use it so that we can have more customers use the thing!"
Those 3 versions of GMail could have been one version that was most useful. There was no time constraint for it since it was a side-project.
The links to nowhere sounds like a good idea except I don't think it indicates interest in the feature being built. A link's text is usually very short and you don't really get any demographics from a click. If you knew 15 to 20 yr olds were clicking a link but the rest of the site was mainly used by 30 to 40 yr olds, you might want to spin out the link as a separate site instead of just a new feature or something. But how do you know how interested people really are? :/
Re: You Release Late and Infrequently
#9The Wufoo example is awful. Shouldn't have taken more than 5 min for them to realize, "HEY the Flash experience on GNU/Linux sucks! Maybe we shouldn't use it so that we can have more customers use the thing!" Those 3 versions of GMail could have been one version that was most useful. There was no time constraint for it since it was a side-project. The links to nowhere sounds like a good idea except I don't think it i…
Interesting criticisms of PB's approach to building gmail.
Can you share a link to a product you've shipped in the past 12 months and some of your experiences about building it?
Re: You Release Late and Infrequently
#10Just this weekend I watched Machinima.com's documentary series on the history of Valve Software: http://www.machinima.com/film/view&id=42271 One of the common themes in the series is Valve's frequent choice to delay shipping in order to get things right. Gabe Newell says something like, "Your software is late for a while, but it's bad forever." As far as I can tell, this has worked extremely well for them. Which make…
Another story on valve that I read indicated that they do lots of testing and iterative design in house in the early stages, so they seem to have an internal 'release early, release often' culture, at least as compared to other large game company cultures.