kevinwal
I don't mean to belittle anyone's considered and well articulated opinions here, not at all, but holy crap, it's only been four months! I'm amazed and impressed that Cakewalk is getting it so right so quickly out of the gate. That tells me that they must have been an agile shop (or at least semi-agile) for some time internally. Yeah, maybe the release management side might have had a few burps, but as with playing a musical instrument, you just get better at the stuff you do really frequently, so I expect that aspect to improve over time as well. And I'll bet my next two paychecks that the drum map project loading scenario is now part of the formal regression test suite, lol.
Most of all, I am hugely impressed that the executive leadership approved such an audacious program to go with the transformation to a "membership model" when they could have done something a lot less aggressive and let the buckaroos roll in for a while.
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for your understanding. Your points are pretty spot on. Though we don't follow the "traditional" agile methodology, we have been agile for at least 8-10 years in the way large features are developed. i.e we split them up into milestones and each milestone was internally tested like a shipping product. So we had dev and QA cycles all through the year. From this year as you know the big change is to release features as they become available - i.e. when the final milestone for that feature is complete as opposed to waiting for ALL features to be complete.
Drum Replacer for example had several internal milestones or mini releases as you could call it - the DSP, the UI the integration/ARA, MIDI, code Refactoring, etc.
We experimented with releasing smaller updates several years ago - even before X1 if memory serves me, but didn't have all the delivery and support infrastructure to do that at the time, so it wasn't very successful and met with internal resistance. The final approval to switch to this system came from no other than Henry Juszkiewicz our CEO, who is a really savvy forward thinking technical guy (you wouldn't expect that from a CEO of a guitar company!) besides being an avid SONAR user himself and a business genius. What allowed us to attempt this finally was building the whole delivery infrastructure for this model which is key to making it all work. We still have some growing pains obviously but we now have infrastructure to allow us to be orders of magnitude more responsive and release updates quickly. In one of the first releases we shipped a point update two or three days after including the development, testing and release management. As you probably know fixing bugs is easy its the test, approval and release management process (X versions of windows, localization, Y languages, etc) that is the typical bottleneck in such situations.