Many U2 (Universe and Unidata) programmers had disliked and voiced their opinion negatively when U2logic announced many years ago that our XLr8 Tools was going to 3 to 4 week release cycle. We felt that most of our bugs and enhancements could be released after they had been completed, unit tested and quality tested. While Firefox, Chrome, and Safari browsers were getting released at least every month and half, we did not see any reason we could not do the same even though we have a smaller team.
Just the other day Rocket Software announced that it has been releasing it's Eclipse based tools almost every month since March of this year. They also stated that they had fixed around 60 bugs, plus added many new features. A competitor vindicates our strategy.
During the same period as Rocket Software, U2logic has enhanced and fixed over 140 items. We should be patting ourselves on our back for a job well done. This represents a lot of work from our staff of programmers, testers, QA's, and customers.
Whenever we are going through our Bugzilla items and deciding what we will tackle in the next few weeks, we are always aware of this mandated release schedule. We have stopped working on some enhancements because they are taking too long and would contribute to a slower release schedule.
The question becomes can we keep this strategy going for more than a couple of years? Is this strategy harmful to our customer base? And last but not least, can we remember what the release numbers mean after 10 or 15 releases?
Just in case you have not updated your copy XLr8 Tools, the current release is 3.5.15 which was released yesterday.
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