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March 25, 2008
Perfect apps?
Perfect apps? They probably don't exist. Here, Paul Robertson of the Adobe AIR team has some first-month thoughts on the meaning of "release version": "So what does 'release quality' software really mean? Well, it means that it doesn't have any bugs that are 'showstopper' issues, or that are 'really bad.' Yes, I'm intentionally using non-specific terms here. The reality of life is that if Adobe (or any software company) waited to release software until all known bugs are fixed, the software would never get released." Particularly with a 1.0, there's always a long, long list of improvements to make, and there will always be different opinions on how vital each potential change is to make, or the risk each one introduces... one of the difficult tasks in project management is to sort through all these desired improvements, figure out the costs of each, the risks of each, the return on each, and then to find the path that will help the greatest number of people to the greatest degree, so that people can get started on assured development atop a stable release build. (I don't like the word "bugs" because one person's bug is another person's feature-request, and the phrase "full of bugs" is used casually online to deter people from further study. All change-requests are valid, in my opinion, and slide along a cost/usefulness scale. The big question is how you can get the most valuable functionality to the most people, most quickly, and with the most confidence.) Anyway, it's pretty obvious by now that lots of people are excited about AIR and its future potential... check Paul's post if there's a particular change you want that is not yet in the engine. Odds are we're working on it. ;-)
Posted by JohnDowdell at March 25, 2008 11:10 AM
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Comments
As a user of software it is very easy to call an application "full of bugs". The reality is that for every "bug" that you find in software, there are hundreds of features and functions that are working smoothly.
As for when is it ready, that is obviously a loaded question since each user is really asking "when will it be good enough for me?" Given that each person asking has a different view of the world, you can only answer that in a general sense.
Posted by: Rob McKeown at March 25, 2008 02:58 PM