software development

• One to Throw Away

  28 Oct 2009 by Dean / 1 Comment

  Eric Raymond wrote about the release early, release often mantra heard often in the Linux open source community in his famous software essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Since then, it’s become the rallying cry of the extreme programming and agile software communities, and driving principle behind Web 2.0 companies everywhere.

  Paul Graham listed “release early” as the #1 Hardest Lesson for Startups to Learn. So we were determined not to make that mistake when we started Infovark.

  Oops

  It’s taken us two years to release version 1.0 of Infovark. Sure, we had some Alpha and Beta tests along the way. We also had several prototype and demo versions. These don’t count as a release, though.

  If you summed up our development experience over the past two years, it didn’t follow the trendy “release early, release often” paradigm as the much older “build one to throw away” model. Build one to throw away is a famous line from Fred Brooks’ seminal work, The Mythical Man-Month.

  Where a new system concept or new technology is used, one has to build a system to throw away, for even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time. Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.

  Tim Bray describes exactly that experience when working on a module to implement the Atom Publishing Protocol. And you could argue that Microsoft’s recent experience with Windows Vista and Windows 7 follows that model as well.

  It certainly describes what we did with the Infovark Alpha. We restructured and rebuilt almost the entire application based on what we’d learned. The idea remained the same, the look and feel stayed roughly the same, but everything under the hood got a total rewrite.

  It easily added nine months to our release schedule.

  The right choice

  It was a really hard decision to make, but it was the right one. We have a much faster, much more stable system to work with now. The number of bugs we’ve had reported to us in the two weeks since release is lower than any other 1.0 version of software I’ve worked on.

  I’ll talk about the gory technical details of what we did and why on our Underground blog, for those that are interested.

  You can download a trial copy of Infovark here. And for those of you that have it already, you might want to check out our very first update announcement.

  Because from here on we plan to release early and often.

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