Product Release Schedules

BeyondVC has a interesting article about how his firm prefers to see start-up companies manage product delivery schedules.  The firm prefers date driven schedules instead of content driven schedules.  After working in development and management of software products for 15 years I observed that this approach has become the industry best practice for nearly all types of software development projects.

Date driven release scheduling has a number of advantages:  it forces the project team to bite off a manageable chunk of requirements for the release, gives both the project team and users a predictable release schedule, and makes the projects easier to manage. For a primer on date-driven releases in software development, I suggest Rapid Development by Steve McConnell.