Release early, or release right?

I really like the recent blog post by Tom Taylor, titled “you’ve either shipped or you haven’t“:

You’ve either shipped, or you haven’t. You’ve either poured weeks, months or even years of your life into bringing a product or a service into the world, or you haven’t.

If you have, you’ll know what I’m talking about. You’ll have flicked a switched, cap deploy‘d, or flipped your closed sign to open, and just waited – holding your breath for whatever happens next.

Tom makes the obvious but highly pertinent point that actually shipping something (the term ‘shipping’ is an Americanism, I think, but I can’t think of a good alternative) is a hugely important milestone. Without that step, what you’ve produced is just vapourware. Just an idea. Just something in perpetual development that nags away at you.

I’m guilty of having started tons of things that never actually got shipped. Sometimes the idea never left paper. Or my head. Many times things get started but never finished.

I’ve also had a bit experience of shipping things which have failed to have much of an impact on anybody at all. Either through lack of awareness, or because the thing wasn’t that great in the first place (or was only interesting to me and no-one else). I won’t list these things in order to save myself some embarrassment (I’m not even sure whether half of them still exist or not. I daren’t check).

Actually shipping stuff is a great feeling though.

We (Rattle) hope to be shipping one thing on Monday. It’s only a small thing. A really small thing. But it was originally my idea (though we worked on it as a team), so I feel some ownership of it. And if no-one else gets it, then it’s probably my fault. That doesn’t matter too much though, it was a fun project to work on, and hasn’t taken too much time.

We’re also putting a price on the thing we’re shipping. Not really because we hope to make tons of money from it. But because pricing something gives it some value, and makes it mean a lot more when people are willing to pay for it. The idea of actually selling something feels good (even if it’s only for nominal cost).

One dilemma we’ve faced a bit though, is picking the point at which to say “okay, that’s good enough to ship”.

There’s a mantra in software development of “release early, release often”. It’s a good argument, and feels like a truism. But it always seems to apply more strongly to stuff that’s already shipped, than stuff that hasn’t yet shipped. The initial release still feels like a bit milestone – something to be considered carefully.

Partly, I think this comes from the observation that so many things get a huge amount of initial ‘buzz’ when they first launch. And then this drops off a cliff after a few days, and often never gets discussed again. Social media makes this initial spike even more dramatic. You can see this happen with big projects like Google Buzz and Google Wave, both of which launched in a wave of publicity, and then nosedived and became pretty obscure. I’ve also informally heard from friends that this pattern has been repeated for some of their projects.

The question is, then, given the initial peak of interest might be all you ever get, how long should you wait and how much perfection should you put into your products before shipping?