Adobe Edits the Development Cycle

The Register’s Mary Brancombe talks to Adobe Photoshop co-architect Russell Williams about the changes his team made for the development of Photoshop CS3:

Probably the most effective thing we did was institute per-engineer bug limits: if any engineer’s bug count passes 20, they have to stop working on features and fix bugs instead. The basic idea is that we keep the bug count low as we go so that we can send out usable versions to alpha testers earlier in the cycle and we don’t have the bugalanch at the end.

The goal is to always have the product in a state where we could say “pencils down. You have x weeks to fix the remaining bugs and ship it”.

★ Wednesday, 14 March 2007