RD9
Thanks Noel,
One thing underlying my preference for the quarterly update that I didn't mention was that it would be my hope that the quarterly update cycle would give CW more time to debug the new code, which would allow the users to move from one clean, stable version to the next. I do appreciate the new features and content but I think most users would put reliability at the top of their list (no, I haven't taken a survey so it is only conjecture
).
I do understand that CW relies to some extent on a keen band of committed users that act as "beta testers" so CW does need to get the updates out to them to find out how the work on a the myriad of hardware and software environments. Lately a portion of the month (~10 days) has been required for this task. On a quarterly cycle this would not seem so large.
Releasing monthly doesn't reduce quality. Two big reasons:
- As Karyn mentioned we don't develop and release features end to end within a month necessarily unless they are truly small features. Often they are incremental feature enhancements or we have been working on it several months before you see it. Drum replacer is a good example.
- The scope of whats released is is much smaller. This gives is more time to thoroughly vet the feature. This is not that different from what we did earlier in a typical annual cycle except that end users never got to see it until a year later. i.e. we'd finish up a smaller feature much earlier on in the year, test it and then and move on to other stuff.
And to clarify we have an
internal beta team of typically about a 100 users, in addition to official Cakewalk QA engineers who are always looking at anything new as well as regression testing older features.
Its well accepted in the software industry that this approach yields better quality software. The fact like a giant like Microsoft is doing this should be evidence that a lot of thought has been given to this methodology.