And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

As I battled the demons towards the planned launch of FlowBreeze 2.0, I stumbled upon Clarke Ching’s Rolling Rocks Downhill, a business novel about Agile Development in the tradition of Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal. It’s a great read so far, and I encourage everyone to take a look. It also made me change how I will do business here at BreezeTree.

I’ll be honest, FlowBreeze isn’t exactly the most complex code base you’ll come across. So I never looked at it from the perspective of a big, hairy project that could benefit from the use of a lot of the Agile Practices, although I already do Test Driven Development to a certain degree. For a small business there are a number of advantages to releasing major updates, which I won’t go into here. Many of those advantages will go away as I work towards more automated builds.

But one of the problems with FlowBreeze 2.0 is that so far, it doubles the size of the code base. And I haven’t even implemented all the planned features yet. In fact, there are a few features that have turned into such beasts that they are holding up the completion of the project.

What I’ve decided to do is switch tacks and start releasing individual features under minor release versions. The first release will be FlowBreeze 2.0, but the version number change is due to the numbering I’ve used for source code control more than anything. But honestly the difference between FlowBreeze 1.3 and 2.0 will be minor. Then I will start releasing minor versions of FlowBreeze - 2.1, 2.2, and so forth in more frequent succession.

Stay tuned…