Whether it
is Facebook, or LinkedIn, or now even Microsoft, software changes will be
released at least on a weekly basis or even daily basis by these companies.
Not to mention Google, Mozilla, or Oracle that are releasing software and
a continuing basis for many years, this is a trend that it only
escalating.
The quality assurance departments of those companies are either pulling
their collective hair out or rejoicing in that the daily changes are far easier
to test than changes that have taken the company many months or years to
produce. Probably many companies are just releasing software and hoping
for the best outcome like Google did for years with the word Beta on the
software page you were running. Do we really know or really care?
What all of the CRS means that changes have to be drilled down to their smallest
element. The maximum time for those code changes and bug fixes are
reduced from months and weeks to hours. That means the programmers must
have a laser focus as to the problem or enhancement and not worry or even think
about the other ramifications of this change. Those issues should have
been already thought of by the person filling out the bug or enhancement
request.
We here at U2logic have put out 25 plus releases this year for our
flagship XLr8 Tools product. There have even been some days that we have
put out 2 releases in a day for various reasons. One particular reason
was the feature was requested by a user in the morning after we had generated a
release and that user needed the release today. We put out another
release late in the afternoon with that feature.
In order to keep some control of your CRS you must have a good version
control. Another indispensable product is bug tracking system. At
U2logic we are using SVN for version control after using CVS for many years.
We are using Bugzilla for bug tracking because there is a built-in
interface for Eclipse. You never have to leave the Eclipse environment to
version control, bug tracking, and programming.
For those applications developers, we at U2logic have been updating our code
on a daily basis and sending it through our XLr8Installer to our
customers. Some days the
customers could get multiple fixes and enhancements. Does this sound like
a Universe or Unidata programming shop? We think not.
This CRS really is Crazy Release Strategy not Continuous Release
Strategy.
