Release Early, Release Often
“Release Early, Release Often” is a term used in Web and software development referring to the concept that you should put a site (or boxed software) into production as early as possible, and to release updates as often as possible. I hear developers use this term all the time, but I never really see the importance of it conveyed to the customer. The benefits of releasing early and releasing often are significant and can make the lifecycle of your site/product more profitable and cause less headaches.
With traditional Waterfall development, you wait until the very end of a large set of features to deploy a site. This method is usually the standard concept of how Web sites are created: decide what you want, and wait for it to be created. The problem is if there are a lot of features you may be waiting weeks, months or years before your first release! With “Release Early, Release Often”, the developer is typically using an agile method, which in a nutshell means building the site feature by feature, and releasing as soon as possible.
Effect on Cost
E-commerce sites are great examples of the benefits of releasing early and often. Let’s say you have a site that will take six months to develop using traditional software development practices (release when everything is implemented and finalized). During those six months your profit from the site is $0. Once you hit the sixth month and the site goes live, your sales and visibility steadily increase. IBy the end of the year you bring in a total of $50,000 in sales.
Now let’s follow the release early, release often practice. After the first month you have a very basic e-commerce site ready. It does not have the blog and news sections, you don’t accept PayPal and some of the categorization features aren’t available yet. The site goes live and customers start making orders. Meanwhile you are under way having the next set of features created. A new set of updates is made to the site every week. By the sixth month your original set of features is complete. And by the sixth month you have brought in $30,000 of sales. By the end of the year you have brought in $160,000 in sales simply because your site has been available to uses for five additional months! In essence the site pays for itself by going live early.
Requirements Changes
It is a fact that requirements change over time. Business decisions are made that effect the priorities of feature sets, or deadlines are moved and require modification of the original project scope. With a larger project these changes can be debilitating to releasing a product. In the example above where an e-commerce took six months to release using the traditional method, what if you (the client) were forced to move to a new inventory management system midway through the project? That type of major change could push back the schedule weeks or months. So now your six month deadline has now become eight months, and you still don’t have a site bringing in any profit. With the release often approach, you can make these shipping changes incrementally with each new release until you are fully migrated to the new system.
Early User Feedback
It doesn’t matter how great you think your new website will be, it matters what the end-user thinks. By releasing early you are able to receive user feedback immediately, which will allow you to make adjustments, assess the potential return on investment, or scrap the project entirely. If your site receives poor feedback and you aren’t hitting the revenue benchmarks needed to continue, you are able to cut your losses early. If you had used the waterfall method and released after the project was completed, you will have spent over twice the time and money just to hear this feedback.
Security and Reliability
No matter how well tested a site is, there are always going to be small bugs that are uncovered as your site’s visibility increases. With a traditional approach you will have to wait until your next set of features is complete (which could be another six months) before these issues are fixed. If you are releasing often though, it may only be a few days before these issues are fixed. With a Web-based product you should always take advantage of being able to release updates instantly with no interaction from the user. If there is a minor bug occurring only to a select group of users, you can fix that issue instantly before anyone else experiences the problem.
Think Small
The major point of releasing early and often is to take small features and build them out quickly and efficiently. All too often we see companies delaying projects entirely just to fit in one more feature they feel is necessary for customers to stay on their site. The reality is most of these features go unnoticed. Your first goal should be getting your site online with the minimum number of features possible. From there you can continue to build your site as you receive vital feedback from the users, and plan your next set of features and changes based on those comments. You can’t build a house without laying the foundation first, and there is no sense in delaying the entire project simply because the light switches you wanted aren’t available.
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From the “this is obvious but it is nice to see backing research” file, 
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