What happened to the hotfix for the 2.15 update?

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  • Jon Watte
    Jon Watte Member Posts: 77 Advisor

    An aside on timelines and estimates:

    The best way to give estimates for software (or, really, any engineering,) is something like "there's a 95% chance that the update will be out in between 3 weeks and 7 weeks."

    And then hold yourself to track those -- if it turns out you are wrong one time out of 20, then your estimation skill is spot on! If you're never wrong, or wrong more often than one time out of 20, you can improve accuracy.

    Do you want a 100% confidence interval? It's always "between right now and the heat death of the universe." Sometimes, very late in a project, you run into some fundamental immovable flaw that means it can't be done. It's rare, but if you mean 100%, and not 99%, then that's a thing you have to consider.

    Unfortunately, users aren't very happy about those kinds of timeline distributions. And marketing is super not happy about those kinds of timeline distributions -- they frequently need to book airtime, collateral production, press events, and the whole shebang, which must be done a long time in advance. But, that's what engineering is -- building things that haven't been done yet so you're essentially inventing something new which always has some risk. Even if the "new" is "new features for an existing hardware platform."

    That being said: I think an honest "it'll be somewhere in the next 3-7 weeks, with 95% probability" will actually serve everyone better than "real soon now," or "with 30% probability, on May 30." I still hold out hope that sophisticated producers and sophisticated consumers can match up on that kind of timeline estimation. Maybe not in my lifetime, but, surely, by the time the giant machine brain runs the Earth, we can achieve this goal?

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