SaaS and the Agile Release Plan
I’ve written previously about the benefits of metronomic release
schedules; benefits for customer and vendor alike. It seems there is a
growing acceptance in the industry of a subscription model, as opposed
to a purchase model for software products and services; Software as a Service.
For everyone to benefit,
- You, the vendor have to plan your releases and release with metronomic regularity; compare the delays with Vista to the 6 monthly releases of Ubuntu.
- Push small increments out to your customers. Perhaps every month,
or every 3 months. This will depend on how big your application is, and
how much you can automate the upgrade (at least for desktop apps) - Get out of the 1.0 – 2.0 mindset. Let your product grow organically, and let your customers see it doing so.
Frequent small releases are a great way to make your product seem really alive – it has a heartbeat. It also gets you a regular dose of the key ingredient – feedback. Regular feedback
allows us to provide regular, iterative enhancements, not big bang
feature drops. When we drive from A to B, we don’t point the car and
accelerate, we make small iterative corrections to the direction and
speed of the car based on the feedback we get from our senses; software
is very similar in this regard.
SaaS has been around for a while, but it’s only recently that I’ve
seen SaaS really getting talked about in Desktop application circles.
Hopefully, we’ll see the adoption of this approach across Shareware and
larger enterprise apps.
