Release early, release often (also known as ship early, ship often, or time-based releases, and sometimes abbreviated RERO) is a
software development philosophy that emphasizes the importance of early and frequent releases in creating a tight feedback loop between developers and testers or users, contrary to a feature-based release strategy. Advocates argue that this allows the software development to progress faster, enables the user to help define what the software will become, better conforms to the users' requirements for the software,
and ultimately results in higher quality software.
The development philosophy attempts to eliminate the risk of creating software that no one will use.
This philosophy was popularized by
Eric S. Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''. He wrote a guidebook for the ...
in his 1997 essay ''
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
''The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary'' (abbreviated ''CatB'') is an essay, and later a book, by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux k ...
'', where Raymond stated "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers".
This philosophy was originally applied to the development of the
Linux kernel
The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...
and other
open-source software
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...
, but has also been applied to closed source, commercial software development.
The alternative to the release early, release often philosophy is aiming to provide only polished, bug-free releases.
Advocates of RERO question that this would in fact result in higher-quality releases.
See also
*
Worse is better
Worse is better (also called the New Jersey style) is a term conceived by Richard P. Gabriel in an essay of the same name to describe the dynamics of software acceptance. It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increas ...
*
Programming paradigm
Programming paradigms are a way to classify programming languages based on their features. Languages can be classified into multiple paradigms.
Some paradigms are concerned mainly with implications for the execution model of the language, suc ...
*
Software development process
In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software devel ...
*
Agile software development
In software development, agile (sometimes written Agile) practices include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/ end user(s), ad ...
*
Minimum viable product
A minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development.
A focus on releasing an MVP means that developers potentially avoid ...
*
Vote early and vote often Vote early and vote often is a generally tongue-in-cheek phrase used in relation to elections and the voting process. Though rarely considered a serious suggestion, the phrase theoretically encourages corrupt electoral activity, but is used mostly t ...
References
External links
Release Early, Release Often chapter of ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar'' by Eric S. Raymond
Software development philosophies
Software release
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