Information Technology Reference
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that addresses user needs better than their competitors. To see how
this might affect the updating of software, suppose that, as a devel
oper, you plan to make half a dozen important improvements over
the coming year. In a nonrushed environment, you might plan all
updates so they will be ready for a significant upgrade in a year's
time; a user's software might remain the same for a full year—pro
viding stability—and the new features can be developed, integrated
into the new version, and tested in a careful and methodical way.
And, with no competitors, such a process might be wonderful.
However, if after a few months a competitor releases a new ver
sion of their software with some of your planned new features, then
your current software may seem antiquated to potential new buy
ers, and you might lose sales. As a response, you might decide to re
lease new versions of software every time work on each of the new
features is complete. With half a dozen improvements planned for
the year, this might create six newly released versions of your soft
ware over the year rather than one at the end. The result would be
many more updates than you had initially intended, but you would
not be at a disadvantage relative to your competitors.
Market forces also can encourage developers to reduce the time
they spend on testing programs before they are released. If your
competitors introduce software with new features, delays in getting
your own software to the marketplace may put you at a disadvan
tage in the market and reduce your sales. As a response, you may
decide to run basic tests on your new versions of software, but
choose to omit comprehensive tests that would consume several
weeks or months. You note that the tests of the new features show
that they seem to be working adequately, and you know the old fea
tures worked fine in previous testing. It would take considerable
time to test that the new capabilities do not interfere with the code
that handled the previous features, so you may opt to omit those
tests in the interests of beating the competition.
Unfortunately, we users know that the quick release of software
can mean that the software contains errors undetected in testing. If
serious errors are discovered after the new version is released to the
public, then as a developer you might have to develop and distribute
a quick fix—again increasing the frequency of software upgrades.
And, of course, none of the previous technical discussion takes
sales of new versions into account. Sometimes, once a user pur
