Don't Grip it and Ship it!
With the recent comeback by Tiger Woods to win the Masters, I was reminded of another golfer who's had his ups and downs. John Daly's challenges were well known during the height of his popularity, and he certainly embraced the "Grip it and Rip it" philosophy as a long ball hitter, often with inconsistent outcomes. Tiger Woods is definitely a more methodical player than Daly, spending much more time on the greens lining up his putts and following a different kind of strategy with more predictable outcomes. Woods is more science than art.
At ICIX, we recently shipped a major Platform release with ICIX 3.0. It has a ton of stuff including a massive refactoring effort, upgraded API 4.0, and improved testing automation use cases. We also upgraded our end to end release process to a 3x per year cycle, with new release readiness and customer communication standards that will make it easier for enterprise customers to consume new features, enhancements, and bug fixes throughout the year. When you ship this kind of release you have to be scientific about it.
Platform releases aren't necessarily exciting for end users. While the Product team gets super excited about streamlining the code base, modularization, and reducing code class sizes, customers care more about stability, ease of use, and low impact release cycles. We're confident the ICIX 3.0 release puts us on a good path towards being able to deliver consistent release cycles with a more predictable set of features. End users like consistency.
This is not a "Grip it and Ship it" release. We worked really hard to lay a strong foundation for the future. With ICIX 3.0, I believe we are at the top of our game and ready to win many more tournaments to come.
Please join me in thanking our top notch Development team, who labored tirelessly through this refactoring effort over many starts and stops, plus our awesome development partners that support our Core and Apps teams around the world. I also want to thank our customers for their support as we've evolved our release process - we believe the best is yet to come as we build on this new foundation.
Go get em Tiger!
-Matt