Sun, Mar 14, 2010 12:53 PM
I recently came across a post in the Rev forums expecting Rev to be bug-free, and this sort of thing comes up often enough from newer developers that it seemed worth addressing here, tagged with "FAQ" so hopefully it won't get lost:
When you get a Rev license you get bug fixes AND new features for a year. You can choose to get those for longer periods at a discounted rate through pre-purchase if you like.
But in a quarter century of buying software I've seen no viable product shipped with zero known bugs, and no vendor who promised to fix all them for free.
The operating system you're using right now - no matter which one it is - was shipped to you with no fewer than several thousand known bugs, and many more yet to be discovered. The browser you're using to read this - whichever it is - has at least several hundred known issues, probably closer to a thousand or more. And yet here we are, using them just the same.
Being closer in scope to a virtual machine than a consumer app, RunRev's bug count is more or less on par with industry measurements for quality in terms of number of bugs per KLOC ("thousands of lines of code").
Rev is far from perfect, and if one of the bugs happens to affect something that's critical for an app you need to deliver, you're no worse off than the rest of the world in being able to use any of the hundreds of other options for completing the work you need on time and on spec.
But by and large, for the work I do I've found Rev quite capable. Not at all perfect, but able to let me do what my clients need done with a higher ROI than we could get using other tools. And when we need something Rev doesn't currently support, we join the rest of the world and use a tool better suited for that specific task. The externals API is a godsend in this regard, since it lets us use a wide variety of other language for specific elements while still enjoying the productivity benefits of building the UI in Rev.
As agile practices have become ever more common across application development, we've seen a trend toward what is being called "good enough software":
http://www.google.com/search?q=good+enough+software
As you move forward with publishing your own software products, whether made with Rev or anything else, there's much to be learned from agile processes and many of the links found among the search results from that Google link.
The goal of software development is to put features in the hands of users as quickly as possible. Sometimes this will be the perfect feature, complete and bug-free, and other times it will work well for only 80% of your customer base while the other 20% will prefer to wait for some enhancement. If you choose to hold that feature back until it serves 100% of your audience, you wind up just punishing the 80% by not giving them the extra value they could benefit from right now.
What RunRev has learned over the years, and what I'm learning the more I adopt agile practices and what the rest of the industry is learning as well, is that it does a better service to your audience to give them what you have when you have it, and refine and enhance it as you go, far more than holding it back until it's perfect.
As one of those articles puts it, "Good enough is best".
As your own company grows to have an audience larger than RunRev's, I'd be surprised if you found a different pattern that delivered more value to more people in less time. And if you do discover such a Holy Grail you'll be famous, and likely rich, as it's been the pursuit of software publishers for decades.
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Richard Gaskin
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