Another major milestone passed

[dsturrock]

Many of you are unaware of our development process. And in fact you don't really need to know about it beyond the fact that every time you look we have lot's more features than when you last looked. There are many reasons for this including an incredible engineering team and high customer involvement. But a significant part is due to our agile development process involving builds and sprints.

Although we have extensive manual testing, our testing foundation is a suite of well over 5,000 automated tests applied each time before anyone can make any change to the software. If that change passes the test suite, it is commited and is automatically compiled, retested, and a releasable image suitable for distribution is created. The result of that process is called a "Build". Our recently passed milestone is that we have now created more than 10,000 releasable builds.

Obviously those do not all end up in public hands. What we refer to as a "Sprint" is simply a three week planning cycle that consists of multiple builds. During each sprint we do additional manual tests as well as updating documentation and other product aspects like SimBits. At the end of each sprint we have tested, documented, distributable software including new functionality.

Most customers don't download and install every Sprint. But we encourage you to do so when convenient so that you are always working with the best software, documentation and examples we can deliver. Most sprints are posted to the Simio Insiders download area. The public releases are updated approximately quarterly.

Here are some of our major milestones and why we so rapidly pulled ahead of the competition:

Sprint 1 – May 2008 (Initial public posting)

Release 1.21 May 2009 (Initial release)

Release 2.31 Dec 2009 (Major Release)

Release 3.42 Aug 2010 (Major Release)

Release 4.58 July 2011 (Major Release)

Release 4.64 Dec 2011 (Enterprise Edition)

Release 4.68 Apr 2012 (2012-13 Academic Year)

Release 5.80 Nov 2012 (Major Release)

Latest build is 5.87.10046 (as of this writing)

10,046 tested, installable Builds created

We celebrated in the usual understated Simio fashion with the development team going out for gourmet coffee. Then back to work on the next sprint .