Open For Business: The practice effect

"Release early, release often. And listen to your customers." Eric S. Raymond (esr) wrote those words in his 1997 essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," and, for a lot of people, they have become the mantra of the open source software movement. While this advice might seem obvious to many, that doesn’t make it any less important. In fact, I’ve often benefited from esr’s maxim myself, and I’ve even come up with a shorthand for why it works. I call it the "practice effect."...

...As the maintainer of a large open source project, I have seen this “practice effect” in action a number of times. Someone creates a feature they feel is needed, but the first version often does little more than the bare minimum to satisfy the requirements of the user. If the feature has limited appeal, that may be the end of it. But if it has broader applications, it won't be long until someone else steps in and makes an incremental (or greater) improvement....