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Website vs. product: monthly Roller releases?

Comments[2] by Dave in Roller

Linda's written up a summary of her smaller-is-better web application release philosophy and Roller fans take note, one of the projects she manages is blogs.sun.com. That's right folks, we're rolling out new blogs.sun.com releases on a monthly basis. Coming from a software product background, monthly releases seemed crazy to me, but Linda (and Will) have beaten me in to submission.

So, monthly releases are good for blogs.sun.com, which is a website, but do they make sense for Roller, which is a product? Sun can't force Roller to make monthly releases, since it's an external and independent project, but should the Roller team try to align with the blogs.sun.com release schedule? Is a monthly release too much for an open source web application like Roller? What if Sun was shipping a jazzed-up version of Roller, would Sun want to ship that once a month?

I'm thinking monthly releases a too much for a product like Roller, but I could be convinced otherwise. What do you think?



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Comments:

I also think that small is better, although it depends entirely on the team and the project. However, I'd say for Roller it'd be inappropriate to align too closely to such scheduling because of its openness and interest in becoming something bigger. I think you should keep Roller moving forward and thinking about the future when it comes to refactoring, componentization, technologies and whatever else new things come up on the blogosphere/web and not what a project manager decides in Sun. They can always have people add stuff they need, but should they tie up the entire dev team with their requests on a rigid schedule? I wouldn't think so.

Posted by Elias Torres on July 31, 2005 at 06:47 PM EDT #

I think the whole idea of monthly released will keep your mojo up and running with new creative tools and add-on each month. But as far as product release that will be unwise. Also I am trying to create a business model out of roller and I will like to see this sort determination and creativity jump start as long as, it puts roller on top of the competition. - I am still having problems with the 500 null error installation which I understand that is caused by Tomcat, any direction or alternatives on where to find help? Thanks Ransford

Posted by Ransford Segu-Baffoe on August 06, 2005 at 06:09 AM EDT #

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