Curt writes:

>As far as release plans go, I was having a beer last night with a
>friend of mine working for a company producing software, and he
>mentioned that they'd moved from sliding the date in order to get
>the features in to sliding the features in order to make the date
>(i.e., when alpha test time comes around, you drop features that
>don't work, rather than delaying, and the same again when you
>release). He said that productivity improved noticably, in part
>because people felt more successful because regular releases were
>going out on time.

This is such a hard concept to sell to management, since it actually
means that business plans are secondary to engineering reality.

The only way I've found it possible to sell this scheme to upper
management is to go to quarterly releases of predictable, small
scale, changes.