Four Revisions

Spending a bit of time making Alexa Skills and learning some new voice tools, I’ve been reminded of what it takes to go from prototype to something that’s an initial release. It’s about four revisions.

Revision 1 — It barely builds. More of a PoC, it kind of shows what you want to do but falls down the moment it’s under any pressure.

Revision 2 — Maybe you can call this a prototype? This would be your beta version. It gets through to the end but there are lots of unanticipated faults along the way.

Revision 3 — This is your first release candidate. It mostly works but there are still bugs. It looks like the end product but needs a bit more polish.

Revision 4 — This ships. A wider user base discovers all sorts of issues you didn’t anticipate but it gets through certification.

The power of software is the iterative development. The result should be that the software gets better all the time. After it converges at some functionality, the developer might think of some way of taking it to a new place altogether and start to plan a new version number. That version might have four revisions built into it as well.

This might seem obvious (or maybe it should have seemed obvious to me) but in coming up with a first draft of a new piece of software, it might seem like the work to get it to ship is trivial but it’s probably four times the original effort to get it to load.

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