by Jaroslav Gergic (@jgergic)
We launched Release 50 last week. (Disclaimer: I swear that launching GoodData Release 50 on the 50th anniversary of the first human space flight was a pure coincidence.) Let me recap how we got from Release 1 to Release 50 in such a short period of time.
The first public beta was launched on July 28 2008 out of a code branch labeled stable-1. We used to have 4-5 weeks iterations back in 2008 and so we managed to release only 3 additional releases by the end of 2008 bringing the total to 4 releases.
We started 2009 on a 4-week iteration but switched to bi-weekly release trains by mid year. This shorter release cycle allowed us to be much more disciplined about release cut-off and lead to more regular releases, because the pressure to delay the whole release train due to an individual slipping feature was much lower, when our product management knew, that the next release is coming in just two weeks rather than a month.
We created 17 stable- branches during 2009, but only 15 of them actually reached the production platform. We skipped two releases, because their stabilization took longer than expected, so their features were rather included in the next subsequent release.
We continued with bi-weekly release and iteration cycle throughout 2010 leading to 23 stable- release candidates, 19 of them actually reaching the production platform.
We eventually switched to Kanban production methodology in Q4 2010, tuned our planning cycle down to one week in order to decrease feature lead time while keeping bi-weekly release trains in place we have had 6 successful releases to date in 2011.
We plan to keep increasing the pace of innovation throughout 2011. Stay tuned for even better and faster GoodData!