cruisecontrol The latest version of WindowTabs is build 423 and its growing fast – sometimes it grows by two or three version numbers in a single day. So what is with this crazy version number and why not a more familiar Major.Minor version? It all comes down to the development cycle.

Release often, release early

I take an “iterative” approach to building WindowTabs which means that instead of releasing a big batch of changes a few times a year, I am constantly adding features in small steps and releasing these new versions every few weeks. Each time I make a small improvement, the version number goes up. After a few days of testing, I make one of these new version the “latest” so that users are notified through the WindowTabs version checker.

The main benefit of making frequent incremental releases is that I get more frequent and timely feedback from my customers which helps me fix issues faster and keeps me focused on adding features that my customers care about.