I’ve been a software engineer for over 20 years and I can tell you that releasing smaller more frequent updates is a de facto standard nowadays. The assumption is that you have modern automated testing practices to ensure quality. The lessons learned from many years ago is that these larger releases that try to do too much often introduce more unexpected bugs and make a release more difficult to test.
Case in point: I spent $100 to upgrade from Dorico 2.2 to 3.0 and see new bugs in 3.0 that didn’t exist in earlier versions: midi keyboard loses connectivity, slowness related to video changes apparently, sporadic page jumping around etc. that makes daily use a frustrating experience now. This is the kind of thing that could be avoided with better QA and smaller more testable and frequent releases. Adding a conductor score is great for the very few people who are going to use that, but lumping big features into a large release and breaking basic bread and butter workflow functionality is going to impact many more people.
Only one of those three “bugs” is new, and that’s the MIDI keyboard connectivity thing. Given that that area was revamped for D3 (making midi keyboards hot-pluggable) it’s not really surprising that there’s a new glitch here.
I doubt you will achieve much by pursuing this further, given the team’s replies. They – and only they – know what their capabilities, limitations and objectives are, and how best to manage them all. The assertion that they might be able to improve with “modern practices” and “better QA” is outrageous conjecture, frankly.
Personally, I am amazed by the speed at which they have released the features and bugfixes that they have.
So you think you can develop software where no new feature ever has a bug when you release it?
I agree you can often do that for simple business software where the basic functionality of the app hasn’t changed for 50 years (or even 500 years - computers are often just an implementation detail). Much of software development is just re-hashing the “same old same old” with the latest technology, not doing anything fundamentally new.
(And before you tell me I’m talking garbage, I’ve developing software for 50 years, so I don’t count 20 years as “experience” - I’ve seen too many developers where “20 years experience” really means “one weeks experience repeated 1000 times but without learning anything from making the same mistakes 1000 times over”)
Interesting thread. Seems quite emotional. I think the OP was maybe just saying it’d be nice if when a bug was fixed, it could be available straight away instead of an update that fixes many bugs but was released a little less frequently.
I for one am very happy with how the team do it, but I can understand the OP and his frustrations. I often have to remember to avoid certain actions that result in a crash (inputting grand staff piano with many flats in 5/8, double clicking the TS from set up mode, and a few other actions that cause me crashes. Don’t worry, Dan knows about these and are fixed for the next release).
Of course it would be nice if there was a “latest build” that I could download, but I totally get this could introduce new bugs/issues and cause more headaches for the team and I’m happy to just remember to be careful and make sure I’m saving regularly.
To the OP, the annoyances (bugs) will be ironed out in time and I’m sure in the future, there will be fewer and fewer bug fixes and more features.
Thanks again Dan for your transparency and honesty. Such a great product.
It is highly presumptuous to suggest to the Dorico team how to do their jobs. You have no idea what resources they have, what business objectives, what testing practices etc. ‘Modern agile’ software devs can add a button to a web page every ten minutes. So what?
Look around at devs in the same domain. Dorico is objectively trouncing the rest of the notation industry in delivering features. The median ship rate of 9 weeks they’ve enumerated puts them well into the top set of music software devs (DAWs etc) overall in their complexity/ship-rate/quality ratios. Do you lecture all of them as well? If you want to use Reaper for its notation, go ahead.
As a customer encountering quality issues, feel free to file bug reports. The Dorico team seems highly responsive to me.
As a developer, please show some more respect for your professional peers. The Dorico team is doing a great job and don’t need a lecture from you.
And that’s why I ditched F****e. I started with the free one, which had some weird behavior. Paid for the song writing version, same stuff happened. Paid for the full meal deal and it was also buggy, had the same bug and a lot of other strange things. Dorico has been a dream by comparison!