Endless development

[Dennis Radeke]

[Paul Neumann] “Adobe seems to be going all in.”

Adobe has been an agile shop, utilizing scrum since CS5 but you couldn’t see the results until we switched to the Creative Cloud model

I think it’s been a fantastic model for development of features and workflows. It’s definitely benefited our customers.

[Paul Figgiani]

This is not meant to be snarky – but I noticed this with apps. by a very popular developer in this community. One app. in particular has somewhere around 35 updates. From what I can see every update includes “bug” or “critical bug” fixes, and nothing more. New features are rare, which is understandable. But 35 updates, all bug fixes? At what point do you start to wonder if the app. is stable enough to use?

If I was running the app. store I believe apps like this should be flagged. As a consumer I’m not saying I wouldn’t buy it. OTOH at least I would know what I was buying.

-paul.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I have a guess as to what app you are taking about, and it’s a translation app?

If so, the FCPXML standard is evolving and new. Testing every single permutation of timeline is absolutely impossible.

If this is the app you are taking about, this is the quintessential application for a constant state of beta as there is simply no way to self test and they must rely on users to give feedback on what isn’t working. I don’t know if this is good or bad, it is quite simply the-way-it-is when development is constantly changing.

I guess Apple could have set out to create a more complete version of FCPXML from the jump, but that would have taken forever, and it wouldn’t have truly been tested until it was released to the rest of the world.

Michael Gissing often mentions the value of supporting a “dead” interchange format like OMF or EDL as at least developers know the target output isn’t going to change, even if the target output does not have a ton of modern capabilities.

Jeremy

[Paul Neumann]

But this shift in software cycles has also required an adjustment in consumer expectations as well. When a product releases early, there’s now an implicit understanding that what’s broken will soon be fixed. And barring a security exploit or privacy issue, that’s not a big deal. When a problematic update rolls out for an app, its not unthinkable to see changes in a matter of days.

This may be the reality for a consumer purchased piece of software, but on an enterprise scale it’s really not true. If my bank’s software keeps me from my money then I change banks. If my car insurance constantly has billing errors due to their software, I change insurance companies. And I do that with full understanding that there’s a massive stack of composite applications inside each one of these companies trying to get 2014 tech to work in concert with mainframe tech from the 80’s and everything in between. When customers leave it costs these companies revenue. And the heft of social media in regards to a company getting it wrong on this enterprise level is a major concern for the people who run these businesses.

[Mark Suszko]

Bill said:

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.– -end quote

This kind of thing has been my life with one project I finished last October. They are STILL tweaking.

[David Roth weiss]

[Dennis Radeke] “Adobe has been an agile shop, utilizing scrum since CS5 but you couldn’t see the results until we switched to the Creative Cloud model

I think it’s been a fantastic model for development of features and workflows. It’s definitely benefited our customers.”

There was almost an entire episode of HBO’s comedy, Silicon Valley, centered around the implementation of SCRUM and coders initial rebellion against it. It was TV well worth watching…

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Walter Soyka]

I think that something missing from this discussion is how much more complex software has gotten over the last decade or two — and I think this is almost as important as the impact of broadband.

If software today seems less tested or more buggy in absolute terms, how does that compare in relative terms versus the comparative capability/complexity of the software?

Also, I think that we are maybe overstating the stability of “polished releases” (the legend of boxed software?) and understating the stability of current software (to say nothing of actual betas).

The thing that makes me the most nervous about “endless development” is actually Apple’s pace of OS development. Not only do developers have to worry about what they’re trying to develop, they have to worry about what Apple will change over a horizon of just a couple years. (I’m still grumpy about Smoke taking forever to get going on Mavericks because 10.9 changed the way textures are uploaded to the GPU. Oh, and I’m grumpy about the grotesque QuickTime/AV Foundation transition.)

I have this stodgy, old-fashioned notion that the OS should provide some stable APIs (not in the sense of crashiness, but changiness). I know of at least one media server developer forced to drop the Mac platform because the choice for their small dev team was adding features or keeping up with the changing Mac platform. This is a pity.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I feel like I should go yell at some kids to get off my lawn.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Paul Neumann] “every business today is a software company.”

My little shop is a software company.

Every project I do has a development component to it. Some are simple: expressions in After Effects. Some are a little more complicated: custom scripts to automate repetitive tasks. Some are reasonably advanced (for a designer): reverse-engineering project file formats and writing custom in-house apps to work on them directly.

The geeks shall inherit the earth.

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

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “I think that something missing from this discussion is how much more complex software has gotten over the last decade or two — and I think this is almost as important as the impact of broadband.”

I guess it depends on what kind of software we are talking about. Some software is probably “easier” (none of it easy) since it borrows from open source or framework libraries. In some cases, a lot of tough coding is already complete.

[Walter Soyka] “If software today seems less tested or more buggy in absolute terms, how does that compare in relative terms versus the comparative capability/complexity of the software?”

I’m not sure. Some software seems to work, and then an update comes out and it breaks, and then another update comes out and it works again. This happens from “complex” apps to more focused mobile apps. This is because developers can’t possibly test across all devices and OS, or if they did, they would never be able to release anything. And of course, software is so modular these days that only a certain aspect of it is broken, and not the entire app.

[Walter Soyka] “Also, I think that we are maybe overstating the stability of “polished releases” (the legend of boxed software?) and understating the stability of current software (to say nothing of actual betas).”

It’s not that, and not what I am taking away from the article or this discussion. I don’t think that all boxed software was polished as the article states, but, as a user, you certainly knew what version you were on, and more or less what to expect from that version. Now there are no more versions, or versions of software are becoming less and less important. It’s as if every single application is a bit of a platform. Some applications play well with other platforms, some don’t play as well.

[Walter Soyka] “The thing that makes me the most nervous about “endless development” is actually Apple’s pace of OS development. Not only do developers have to worry about what they’re trying to develop, they have to worry about what Apple will change over a horizon of just a couple years. (I’m still grumpy about Smoke taking forever to get going on Mavericks because 10.9 changed the way textures are uploaded to the GPU. Oh, and I’m grumpy about the grotesque QuickTime/AV Foundation transition.)

I have this stodgy, old-fashioned notion that the OS should provide some stable APIs (not in the sense of crashiness, but changiness). I know of at least one media server developer forced to drop the Mac platform because the choice for their small dev team was adding features or keeping up with the changing Mac platform. This is a pity.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I feel like I should go yell at some kids to get off my lawn.”

The OS is my worry too. There is such a thing as moving too fast.

[Paul Neumann]

[Jeremy Garchow] “This is because developers can’t possibly test across all devices and OS”

Yes, they can. It’s old methodologies and processes that they’re using that keep them constrained. That and the technology they need to do so is something they don’t use. Virtualized development environments (not machine virtualization but Service Virtualization), automated testing, continuous delivery and continuous validation are all available today.