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Endless development
Nothing is ever complete. We are in a constant state of beta.
The sentiment in this article certainly rings true.
Jeremy
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26 Replies
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Wonder how long it will be before our clients start to think of our video work in the same way?
–Hey Bill, we changed our thinking on the forklift safety video we “finished” last month – could you change the language from “Step 2, “secure your seatbelt” to “Step 2 – you MUST secure your seatbelt before you insert the Forklift ignition key or we’ll fire you butt if we catch you.” Here’s the art for the new forklift safety placards. We need the “revised final” version posted to our training CDN by 2pm. That a problem? Thanks.–
That Timeline Index and the SHARE ideas are looking pretty damn smart, huh?
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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Honestly, that sounds like any typical day from the last 10 years.
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Michael Hancock
Editor -
Video projects are never finished. They reach deadlines.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Michael Hancock] “Honestly, that sounds like any typical day from the last 10 years.”
AMEN.
Just nice to have some fresher tools to address those very common issues.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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Insurance company, telco, hospital network, automaker, airline, bank, retailer, DMV, utility, satellite network…every business today is a software company. The CTO of Bank of America gleefully states he has more developers than Microsoft. And he does. All to keep up.
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I don’t think software was never “finished” before, either. The world was just slower.
So how does perpetual beta affect you? Good? Bad? Indifferent?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Software is one of the few things you buy that is broken when you buy it. Then you pay (usually) to get it fixed, which in turn breaks something else.
😉
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
In today’s “Application Economy” you have to be continually validating every part of every release, automating your testing and virtualizing your development environments. You can’t “break fix” your applications like you could in the past. Agile workflows never really got to where we thought they could be, but that is changing with recent DevOps methodologies. It’s such a mindset change though that older development organizations are slow to embrace it. “My problem is I’m only doing 3 of my quarterly releases a year.”
Meanwhile, facebook, etsy and the like are putting out new releases weekly. Apple is slow to the new way of thinking (trust me, I know) and Adobe seems to be going all in.
The end of massive scheduled, deadlined releases is here. You have to know what’s broken before your customer does because that’s how they talk to you these days…through your applications.
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[Walter Soyka] “I don’t think software was never “finished” before, either. The world was just slower.”
You are right that nothing was finished, but the release cycle was different, and yes it was slower, but I feel like it was also more measured.
Software was prepared to a workable and (hopefully) bug free state, then there was the deadline to get it to press, the manual and help materials had to be written, proofread, and printed along with the packaging, and then shipped to destinations to and fro.
When that product shipped, it was tried and tested. It was usually packed full of features, with a few maintenance releases coming after that, with no real feature updates. That software was a version, and it usually lasted you until the next big version was released sometime a long while later.
Of course, all of that has now changed. It isn’t just about feature releases, but in some applications, complete design and functionality is changed from one dot release to the next.
I think that Apple wanting people to beta test OSX is probably a good thing for the most part, but an OS is a very broad system to open up to the public. I know with more complicated softwares (like SAN software or other software that relies on internal OS exploitations, interoperability, and database systems) changes take longer because Apple doesn’t tell you exactly what has changed in the OS at that deep of a level.
So this means a constant state of beta could completely knock out another developer’s functionality as tracking of changes becomes harder and harder to follow or keep up with, and the more people that get comfortable with receiving fixes “in a matter of days” the more likely people are to upgrade without testing, even though everyone is constantly testing with or without knowing it.
To answer your question, I don’t know how it will effect me exactly, but I assume it will add more work to an already full workload. Everything updates all the time, so troubleshooting is much harder as rolling back to the previous version is impossible. This is fine when it’s your own machine, but if you have a group of machines to look after, it gets harder.
On the other hand, if constant updates bring more functionality that actually help rather than hurt, then complaining is futile.
I really don’t know how Apple is planning on releasing a new OS every year. If you aren’t Bank of America, or anyone else that can afford more developers than Microsoft, how do you keep up with the constant demand of maintenance updates as well as developing new features?
Jeremy
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An experienced editor once told me that a show is never finished, merely abandoned. Software is the same.
Earlier in my career I was much more accustomed to alpha software and working with developers testing new features on working jobs. In recent times I have been happy to let others take a turn at the bleeding edge and my software and hardware cycles have actually slowed but I do see that release and beta software is closer in time than it used to be.
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