With the early shipment of the September and December releases (the 04-Dec release contained most of what had been promised for 31-Jan), Dan and the development team have changed they way we forecast development.
Most software folks have learned to be wary of detailed forecasts -- they either make you a liar when you don't meet the prediction, or they become straightjackets to your development. Neither of those outcomes serve the project or the user community.
As a result, we've been persuaded by our experiences, and by works like Product Roadmaps Relaunched (O'Reilly), to adopt a more nuanced and modern approach to giving guidance on our software development plans.
We now use the following terms and meanings
- Milestones are for long term forward planning. Milestones make up a Roadmap, and consist of
- Timeframes
- Themes (i.e. user needs, areas of concern, and problems to be addressed)
- Release Plans are for short term forward planning. Release Plans consist of
- Release Names (e.g. Dawn 2.1)
- Specific Dates
- Specific Features (i.e. specific code that addresses a need, concern or problem in a specific way with a specific resolution)
- Release Notes are backward looking documents that contain a summary of what code was actually released, and notable problems that we know about but haven't addressed.
What this means
We won't be announcing the date for Dawn N.N until the timeline is close enough for us to have high confidence.
We won't commit to specific features early. Instead we'll commit to working on themes. Those themes will be addressed in various potential features. We'll deliver product features when those features are ready.
Originally posted here.
PS: Developers will see the difference on the Milestones (theme oriented) and the Releases (feature oriented) pages of GitHub.
Thomas Cox
VP of Product at block.one