The Perils of 1.0
Whenever there’s a release of a big new piece of software, I always have internal fear inside me: that even after long days and nights of testing, fixing, and re-testing, that there’s still some significant bug hidden in there somewhere. In a version 1.0, these bugs are typically easily fixed and really annoying.
In 1.0 software (or the first public release, whatever version that may be), typically the only people who have seen it are the people who have worked on it. So, when it’s released to an audience that is several orders of magnitude larger than it was perviously, the number of people “testing” it is sever orders of magnitude larger. That typically means that if there’s a hidden bug still lurking somewhere in the program, it’ll probably be found.
For example: Old Faithful. This widget was released as version 1.0. A few days later we had to fix a couple bugs with version 1.0.1. A couple weeks later, we had to update it to fix the webcam: version 1.0.2. And so on. Old Faithful is now at version 1.1.1. And we’ve got another update coming to that widget soon.
I know I’m not the only one who has experienced this. Daniel Jalkut at Red Sweater Blog had a similar experience with his recent release and subsequent update of his new application, FlexTime.
Moral of the story: When using 1.0 software, keep in mind that the only people to use it before you were the developers.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006 at 07:00 PM
Yeah, Mason? Well, YOU’RE not cool!
Continued success, Galen.