Overcooked and how many courses in a meal?

Two vacations in the same month definitely means I've left a few items on the grill for too long - this blog being one of them.  Sorry about letting it go for a while.

On the plus side, I have a "secrect sauce" idea to share today.  Agile software development suggests frequent releases, but enterprises generally don't like to update software frequently.  So the question of the day is how many releases per year makes sense for an enterprise product?

For very mature enterprise products that are installed on premise, I would suggest that probably once per year is about as often as customers will tolerate.  This depends a lot on the upgrade pain, but that generally seems like a good rule of thumb (plus or minus 3 months).

But startup companies are almost always delivering younger products, so there is a period early in the life of a product that provides the greatest opportunity to evolve it quickly and use agile practices.  As enterprises are in the evaluation and rollout phases, new functionality can be added quite rapidly. 

For our NewsGator Enterprise Server, for example, we have delivered four releases this year.  Now the product is quite mature for its one-year-old age, but we have been able to be extremely responsive to customers and deliver a lot of great functionality (as well as globalize it for delivery via our partners in Japan) by focusing on short cycles.

As the product matures and the installed based continues to grow, the test load increases and, for efficiency purposes, it makes sense to do longer development cycles to balance against the increased testing duration.  At the same time, enterprise customers have rolled out and tend to start prefering less frequent updates.

So the "secret sauce" is to iterate quickly on young products.  Hopefully that makes up a little for leaving the grill unattended for a while.  Talk to you again soon.