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Comment by flamontagne | Hacker News Reader

Like Dan, I think that releasing early and often is a bit overrated as a concept. It was started by 37signals and people have a tendency to read their stuff like it was their bible.

There is definitely a danger to release early and often : You have less time to think about your core idea. If you embark yourself in a quick release cycle without precautions, you have greater chances to forget about the product as a whole and its evolution. This is what happened to us. Now you could say that it happened to us just because we are stupid, but it would be more productive to start cogitating on the implications of bold statements like "Release early and often".

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It was not started by 37signals, it was popularized by them. The practice has been around much longer as part of extreme programming, as have most of the things they preach.

The 37signals guys are great marketers but about the only thing unique to come from them, the only practice they actually created, was convention over configuration as a core principle. Everything else they just picked up and repackaged from existing extreme programming principles.

It's way earlier than Extreme Programming. Believe it or not, it was once considered a part of Object Oriented Programming. Here's an article from IBM Systems Journal 1993 where I first learned the idea of ship early and often:

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/323/ibmsj3203E.pdf [PDF]

Oh I believe it, I wasn't trying to imply the practice came from extreme programming, only that that's where I encountered it first.

I'll add that "Extreme Programming" and other forms of Agile is mostly a buzzword/re-branding to wrapper quite a few "best practices" from the OOP world. Which is appropriate since so many of the early agile manifesto folk were the same ones that pioneered the OOP best practices.

"Release early, release often" is an Extreme Programming mantra which has been around way longer than 37signals. I'm not sure who coined the expression though. Maybe Eric Raymond or Linus Torvalds (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...).

I agree strongly with this comment.

There's such a thing as releasing too early. If the idea is not fully developed, and or its architectural ramifications still being explored, releasing early can trap you and make it far more difficult to evolve your concept.

If you're absolutely sure of what you're doing, what you want it to look like, how it will work, and you're just building gradually towards this well-defined final goal - great, release early and get users on board.

But if you're not sure, don't! Once you get a few users who trusted you and put their time into your project, no matter if it was free or not, you can't just walk away. Well maybe you can but I can't.

When you release something, you ask users to commit to your project. It's unfair to do that unless you're equally committed.

I'm a big fan of private betas, where you can flesh all this stuff out before asking strangers to put their time into your app. Very private betas, if need be - just you. Release early and often - to yourself. Maintain a runnable state at all times. Use your app intensively, eat your own dog food, evolve it that way. I like this kind of advice, not 37Signal's cookie cutter platitudes.

We'll be doing private beta in july. Check out http://www.timmyevolved.com to get involved.

Well, OK .. but I have no idea what your application is even for. Timmy? Evolved? That means nothing to me. Who or what is Timmy? And don't say "go and find out" - why should I have to go and research what the nature of your product is?! I've already visited the web site, and it didn't say!

I'm sure you and your team are well versed in everything to do with Timmy, but please understand that no-one else has any idea what you are talking about. Uh-huh. I see a lot of lightning. That's a nice slideshow you put together there. Very impressive. I might look at the source to see how you did it. WTF is Timmy?

Imagine I pointed you to a link called Michael Evolved, with a nice slideshow and music, telling you that now, Michael is moving to the Next Level! Sign up now for the Michael private beta! You visited the link. You gave it several minutes of your attention. You have no fucking idea what it is talking about. You'd be posting the exact same thing back to me. Who, or what, is Michael? Who knows! Maybe ask Timmy!

There's some truth in what you are saying. We could put a link somewhere pointing to timmyontime dot com so people can have a better idea of what we are talking about.

By the way, are you angry or something? I don't understand why you are pissed off like that.

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