I had a conversation with our development team this morning. The discussion was about whether to release one of our tools now, and get important updates to customers as quickly as possible, or wait until some very complicated changes were complete. As the owner, I ALWAYS advocate for getting updates to customers as quickly as possible in spite of the fact that more frequent releases create a lot of extra work for the QA team, and additional work associated updating installers, manuals, and staff training.
When faced with the choice of getting other important updates to 3CX out now, and pushing scheduled reports to a later release, I will always advocate for more releases rather than fewer. After all, 3CX could have waited to release SP1 until the scheduled reports changes were completed, but what does that accomplish? It wouldn't get you scheduled reports any sooner, but it would allow them to say "see, we got it out with SP1". I don't think that's what is in our best interest.
My suggestion is ALWAYS wait to upgrade 3CX until ALL of your critical features are released and don't count on any tentatively (aspirational) release dates. Writing code ALWAYS takes longer than expected. It's a truth that is burned into my brain after 40+ years of development experience. I have found that if I take my aspirational release date, and multiply it by 4, I get pretty close to reality.
With respect, it's a brave dev that knowingly ships something that removes a critical feature for a large part of the user base with a promise of a later fix without calling it a "beta".
This isn't leaving something as it was instead of updating it - it's removing the feature, saying it will turn up in U1, quietly dropping it from U1, delaying U1, when this is pointed out going back and revising the previous blog posts that said it would be in U1 to remove all mention, and.. finally... including it in U1 after all?
Because it now looks like it's in update 1 which mentions features / fixes as follows:
Update 1 is available for download in production environments.
Hot off the heels of the
release candidate, Update 1 is now available for download in production environments. In case you missed the
BETA and
BETA 2 releases, these are the main features included:
- Up to 50% faster backup & restore
- Caller ID exceptions to working hours - guide
- New Pipedrive CRM Integration - guide
- Scheduled Reports - guide
For more information on what’s been added to Update 1, read the
release notes.
- Fixed scheduled reports being sent when PBX is in Failover Passive mode
- Fixed deadlock when initializing service.
- Fixed ring group statistics export, csv does not contain Total Received & Total Unanswered columns.
- Fixed scheduled team queue general statistics report.
- Fixed scheduled reports for last year include wrong results.
They've fixed bugs in U1 for features that weren't even included in the U1 RC and had been pushed to U2.
Confusing? I certainly did a double-take.
Don't get me wrong, this is great news and I am not complaining about having the feature back. It is very much welcome, and
thank you to the devs for working hard to make that happen - 3CX should be trumpeting it as a win that users won't have to wait for update 2!
But I do think it would have saved some angst (for me at least) if the versioning / release had been handled a little differently, and I didn't have to pore over blog posts (which are then revised after I've read them) to figure out what features are attached to what releases.
I mean this constructively, and as a suggestion - blurring the lines between blog posts and release notes creates confusion, particularly when those blog posts / release notes are later revised. Keeping them seperate and making new blog posts with any revisions would make life simpler.
