Shipping Software: The End Game Revisited

Microsoft has been slowly moving to a new development process that will affect how partners and customers evaluate and test its software. The new process replaces a series of relatively infrequent alpha and beta releases with more frequent Customer Technology Previews (CTPs). The new process should help Microsoft gain more feedback earlier in the development cycle, but it won’t necessarily help the company ship its products on time or with fewer bugs.

CTPs Began in Developer Tools

As part of the development process for Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft made available to developers a series of prebeta builds that it called CTPs. CTPs gave customers access to the product at an earlier stage of development than was available with any previous version of Visual Studio.

The Beta Feedback Problem

CTP releases help Microsoft solve a nagging problem of software development: gathering feedback on the product while there is still time to do something about it.

Under the traditional model of software development practiced by Microsoft and most large software developers, builds of a product are not made broadly available until the “beta” stage, when all of the features have been designed and implemented and the product has reached a reasonably high level of stability. (For a breakdown of the traditional stages of development, see “Traditional Phases of Software Development“.) But by the time a product has reached a beta release, it is very difficult for a development team to make significant changes to a product’s design without significantly delaying the release.