My Internet Notebook

a journal on software, mobile, marketing

Microsoft: No more five-year waits for SQL Server

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Via | CNET News.com – Microsoft: No more five-year waits for SQL Server | CNET News.com

Microsoft is changing to shorten its product release cycle for big things like SQL Server. SQL Server 2005 had customers in waiting for 5 years. Mark Souza, who is leading the so-called Software Reengineering Initiative (SRI), hope to change that painful process for the better.

Most software projects have release cycles shorter than two years, much less than five years. The most important thing I found that is vital in keeping a release short and on-time is the feature list. Do we have a feature list that is reasonable and practical? Also a feature requirement doc is a living thing, the team has to learn how to keep it from growing too much.

Another important misconception about features is that somehow marketing people think that re-writing of an existing feature (hopefully to make it better) does not count as a new feature. This is just plainly wrong. In my experience, re-writing a feature that is part of a big legacy code-base is even costlier than coding a new feature. Project managers also too often underestimate this.

Written by Y.

November 22nd, 2005 at 1:22 am

Posted in Software

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