I have been spending a lot of time lately talking to Scott Abel from Spiceworks. One of the things that I keep hearing from him and his team is how quickly they are able to add new features to their product. Long term readers with sharp memories will remember that I am against short release cycles. I still am, too. But for some products, particularly Web based ones, can benefit from a release cycle oriented more towards individual features and less about entire versions.

A Web application is typically a collection of miniature applications which work together coherently. Why wait six months to upgrade one part of the site just because you want to upgrade everything at once? It does not make sense to me either.

On the other hand, products that are sold to customers as a comprehensive package really cannot work this way. Why not? Because the customer has paid for a particular feature set. What is the vendor supposed to do? Sell a feature set that is not finished yet, and tell the company that the product will “eventually