FROM THE IGLOO

We have always prided ourselves on being a feedback driven organization, focused on the needs of the market and individual customers. We are attempting to be more transparent with our product planning and development process itself. I hope the existence of this blog demonstrates that. As part of that initiative, we are releasing a new utility (Faronics Data Igloo Standard), as a beta. This is the first of several new products that are planned to be initially available as betas over the coming months.

Calling something a beta is not our excuse for attempting to get the community to perform QA for us. Data Igloo has already undergone a full QA cycle. The purpose of these beta releases is primarily to get feedback from real users after an iteration of development and QA has been completed.

Our product development is often performed in iterations that lead up to an official release. If at the end of an iteration we are satisfied that the product is stable and could benefit from user feedback, then we may release it to our users in order to get that feedback. That feedback will influence the direction we take on subsequent iterations. It will also help us with planning the launch of the official release.

I should point out that the specific development methodology used varies by project. The suitability of releasing something as a beta varies by project as well. Therefore, we won’t be doing this for every single product release in our roadmap, but we will be doing it when suitable.

If all of this is clear as mud, you may be interested to read more about the concept of iterative development on Wikipedia or elsewhere.

Quick and very, very ridiculously over-simplified example

Product X will have 12 features. All 12 features are required before the product is ready for the market. It is developed by working on 3 features at a time in each of 4 iterations. The product will be released at the end of the 4th iteration.

Therefore, at the end of each of the first three iterations (after verifying that everything works), there are two choices:

1. Move on to the next iteration.
2. Move on to the next iteration and share this one with users to get feedback.

With Data Igloo and some other products coming up, we are choosing to go with option #2. The only thing we ask is that if you use one of these products, please send us feedback!