| > Just release when there's something to release. This emphatically does not work very well for big projects. The problem is human pyschology and the unreliability of all effort estimation processes (in software development). Once people get used to the idea that "well, we'll just postpone the release a little bit" then it eventually becomes a routine thing and for popular projects there's always someone who has a good reason that their particular feature should make it in before the release. (Because who knows when the next release will be?) The Linux kernel and the C++ ISO standards committee have got this EXACTLY right (since C++11). Predictable releases means: a) you don't need to rush anything particularly because you know there'll be a new release in N months. b) any incidental small (not-worthy-of-a-release) bugs get fixed in the interim. c) downstreams can plan based on when your next release is going to happen. Predictability is a huge deal and IMO it's incredibly underappreciated just how much it matters. Even if it meant a 10% or 20% 'efficiency' loss (on some metric) I would personally still consider it a win. For an example of not doing it this way, look at C++ pre-2011 and perhaps also ECMAScript pre-2015. (This is also rampant is development, though no public examples come to mind right now. I'm sure some other commenter can supply some. It's so bad that it can in fact kill projects.) EDIT: I forgot to mention: Regular updates also means that the "consumer" must get into the practice of regularly applying updates... and will thus become forced to get better at doing that. Ideally to the point of having completely automated updates. |