On 5 Dec 2001, at 16:23, Ivan Prenosil wrote:

> > We (the compnay that I work for) can not and will not ship beta, RC,
> > etc., code, only release code.
>
> What is your definition of "release code" ? Sticker "Version x.0" on
> box (as opposed to "x.99") ? :-) I think that customers are interested
> only whether software works as expected or not, which frequently has
> nothing to do with whether code is labelled as beta or release
> (generally; I am not speaking about IB/FB now).
>

I would agree, Version x.0 is a MARKETING ploy, it often has
nothing to do with the code, I have seen commercial product
releases where it seems they got a compile with no errors, and
released the code, as a new version. Marketing is also why some
products suffer from featuritis, because it's a positive that the
marketing guys can put in a commercial. You can't easily market
bug fixes, so most vendors end up giving them away, and that is
expensive.

O/S projects tend to be very conservative about testing before they
are willing to call code "production quality", because there is no
marketing department driving them towards that release, it tends to
have to wait.

The problem O/S projects suffer from is that they keep adding stuff
and putting off the process of starting the Beta testing, then you
get years between releases. Ideally the FB team should set the
schedule for V1.5 now, with the idea that as of a certain date, what
features have been proposed will actually get implemented,
features proposed after that date, wait for 2.0.

Paul









Paul Schmidt
Tricat Technologies
paul@...
www.tricattechnologies.com