Part 2: Maintenance Development strategy
In Part I of last month's post, we spoke briefly about our maintenance development process. Thank you for taking the time to read and participate in that thread.
I want to follow that post now with part II of our development strategy and relate that to the quality process here at IDM.
To summarize Part I...
The focus of Part II of this series is to explain how a hotfix becomes an official release and how that action relates to our emphasis on quality.
As you see on our site, this month we have rolled three hotfixes into an official UltraEdit v14.00b production download. Thousands of users and beta testers have downloaded the hotfixes and verified that the changes and improvements are stable and meet/surpass their needs. The hotfix process can take as little as a day, a week, and/or even months. In the case of the release of v14.00b, we took just over two months to season the hotfixes and perfect the changes in order to provide our customers an extensively field tested build.
Why so long? Maintenance development and quality go hand in hand and every release is yet another turn of the quality cycle. It is not possible for us to schedule a turn in the quality cycle. It does not serve a timeline, rather it is an ongoing pursuit of excellence and text editing perfection that involves our entire staff and many thousands of our users. We seek internal verification through our QA and code review process - where painstaking regression testing takes place. Once internal checks are complete, we seek external verification through cooperating with our customers and test groups. We then offer the upgrade to our public after reaching the point of eliminating all known flaws.
As you may expect, maintenance and new feature development share this same process. Indeed, quality demands constant attention and is a focal point in our development strategy.
Your thoughts are always welcome.
Best wishes,
-Rich
Richard L. Knott
Vice President
IDM Computer Solutions, Inc.
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