One interesting thing to note... Chrome operated with a 4-releases per year schedule from beta launch until late 2010, before switching to the interleaved 12-week cycle mbrubeck mentions. While the quarterly release process represented a definite improvement over the one release every 12-18 months we had been familiar with before, it still had some drawbacks.
The period of time required to put together a release was still sufficiently large that both engineering and management felt pressure to shoehorn stuff into releases. The cost of missing a release was waiting another quarter. For many engineers this means missing your quarterly objectives completely. The temptation to ship unpolished features was high, and the morale hit for missing a release was still tangible.
Moving to the interleaved cycle with 6-week updates is intended to break down these problems by making the consequences of missing a release less severe to both engineers and management. We are still in the early days of this approach and the team is getting used to the adjustment.
I'm pleased to see Firefox is going to be trying to improve the frequency of their releases. Staying fresh is critical to vitality in this modern browser landscape. When I worked on Firefox prior to 1.0 we would do releases roughly quarterly but the team size was much smaller. A high level of discipline in engineering and management is required to maintain regular releases with a large team size.
The period of time required to put together a release was still sufficiently large that both engineering and management felt pressure to shoehorn stuff into releases. The cost of missing a release was waiting another quarter. For many engineers this means missing your quarterly objectives completely. The temptation to ship unpolished features was high, and the morale hit for missing a release was still tangible.
Moving to the interleaved cycle with 6-week updates is intended to break down these problems by making the consequences of missing a release less severe to both engineers and management. We are still in the early days of this approach and the team is getting used to the adjustment.
I'm pleased to see Firefox is going to be trying to improve the frequency of their releases. Staying fresh is critical to vitality in this modern browser landscape. When I worked on Firefox prior to 1.0 we would do releases roughly quarterly but the team size was much smaller. A high level of discipline in engineering and management is required to maintain regular releases with a large team size.