Wojtek said:
Ahh, now that makes sense. RAD and a quick iteration cycle. Does not
help us perfectionists though.
I don't think it _hurts_ perfectionists much at all. The key is to
simply ensure that you have lots of releases in between your start point
and the achievement of perfection
.
A big part of "release early, release often" is to ensure that people
can see you're still actively working on the project without having to
setup CVS (or whatever source control system you're using), download and
build the source just to see if you've made any updates.
The better way to generate and retain interest is to post something
that's partially or mostly working, tell people it's an alpha (or beta,
if it's feature complete) release, and then keep working on it. You can
continue your desire for "perfection", but in a more public manner.
This is what's been done with the jSyncManager project. In the past
two months we've had two alpha releases and five beta releases between
our API and Core Application Set. Many of the alphas weren't perfect,
and some serious issues have been found in the betas here and there as
well (all of which are now fixed, of course
). If we waited for
"perfection", the project _still_ wouldn't be released yet (it is, after
all, a rather big project). So we started last November or so releasing
our "initial" codebase (which was the sources from the last
closed-source release that had been made public, with some minor tweaks
and fixes and new licensing headers), and have had new releases at
intervals ever since.
Releasing this way has allowed people to download and play with our
code. It has attracted developers who have simply wanted to make it do
other things, or who have wanted to add specific abilities. It has
allowed users to test our code and report problems that we hadn't found
ourselves. If anything, it helps us get to the state of "perfection"
faster
.
<shameless_plug>
The Core Application Set v3.0 just saw its first beta release early
this morning, so feel free to drop by
http://www.jSyncManager.org to
download it and give it a spin
.
Off Topic follows!
From my previous employer. You were in Toronto, I was in Vancouver, we
discussed a desktop project.
That is correct. I'm still living in Toronto, but am no longer with
the employer you mention. No matter -- I'm on to bigger and better
things
.
Still trying to get Agent working correctly. My sig should now show up
(I hope). I am used to ProNews/2, but the current source owner has no
interest in porting it to Windows.
Unless that's your .sig, I think you need to work on it a bit more
.
Brad BARCLAY
