If You Build It, They Will Come

If You Build It, They Will Come^[2]

^[2] In fact, the line from the movie "Field of Dreams" was, "If you build it, he will come," the "he" being either Shoeless Joe Jackson or the principal character's father. The line has been so frequently misquoted that most people use this one. Of course, at the end of the movie "they" come, as illustrated by the stream of headlights across the Midwestern plain.

In the world of software products, there are successes and failures, determined by the free market system. We must, of course, add to the list of failures those projects whose products never see the light of daythe ones that are worked on for various lengths of time but never ship. As obvious as it sounds, you cannot be successful unless you meet the precursor of shipping your product.

As you cannot ship what you cannot build, actually putting together the pieces becomes critical. Intrinsic in this is the concept of a repeatable build process. You will build the product over and over again, until one of your candidate releases passes muster and you let it out the door. I now confront the issues involved in creating such a repeatable build process for your product.