[UPDATED - Aug 2015]
You might be wondering why the version no for your deployment is a little different from the cloud environment. This article explains our release policy regarding on-premise customers versus cloud customers.
Read on...
To understand, let me explain how VisibleThread product management works with engineering.
- We are an agile shop.
- We push new capability live to our cloud customers typically once every 2 months, sometimes more/less frequently depending on engineering tempo. We call these mini-releases ‘sprints’.
- For our on-premise customers, that tempo of updates to deploy behind the firewall is not feasible. IT departments seldom have capacity to accept updates at that rate.
- Spints allow product management to prioritise certain capability mid release cycle. We normally do this to be very responsive to customer requests.
So, we bulk up sprints and put a collection of 'chunks' into a major release. These Releases run normally once to twice a year depending on what our product management determine makes best sense for our customers. 2.8, 2.9 etc. are versions of deployed releases for on-premise customers.
So, to be really concrete, let's consider this example.
- The current shipping version is 2.11 for on-premise.
- In the cloud, the version is 2.11.02 – This means that there have been roughly 2 big chunks of additional capability since the base 2.11. If you come from a software engineering background, think of these 'chunks' as sprints, although as a product company whereas classic sprints are typically 2 weeks we’re much longer as we build in a lot of formal QA into every 'chunk' or increment. This chunk approach means we can be extremely responsive to requests from our customers. This is incidentally why we don't publish formal road maps beyond 6 months out.
- So cloud is generally ahead. In this example on-premise customers will get to that level when 2.12 is out. 2.12 will be a batch of all the minor releases (ie 2.11.01 thru 2.11.0x). At that point the cloud version will also move to 2.12. So roughly, once or twice a year cloud and on-premise versions align, then the cloud version moves forward again. Then on-premise catches up.
Mail us on support@VisibleThread.com if you'd like to know more about how our product management or engineering process works.