Recently i came across a question which was "Does the frequent upgrades of a product/software affect the end users"
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I would like to share my thoughts on this one.
Based on several years of experience in consulting, i have participated in 4-5 upgrades of various products/software. And in all upgrade engagements i would definitely say that it does take significant amount of resources, time and money. And again it also depends on the reasons why a particular software is been updated.
Is it because
1) A particular bug is fixed for which the client is waiting for, which is majority of upgrade engagements
2) New features have been introduced in the new version and hence the client is updating the software
3) Many a times i have seen the support has been extended to other platforms. For e.g. Initially a tool used to support only Oracle and SQL Server databases, now in the new version it supports MySQL or Netezza
So in every upgrade project, a customer may have different reasons and it is always a process which everyone has to go through. The Best Practice i would like to follow is " Upgrade the software every six months or twelve months depending on the requirements. 12 months if the requirements are not severe or if we can a get a feature which would be beneficial for IT; it should be six months"
To summarize,
The pros i have seen are end users get new features in a product, extended support to different breed of platforms and cons i see as time, money and resources and majorly the confidence of the end users and most of the time its difficult to buy in the end users.
And to answer the question it does affect the end users, as they have to be made aware of the new features in the tool and again a training process has to be followed so that users get familiar with the new version. In my experience a minor version does not changes the product in and out compared to major version. So it is a case by case implementation and requirements, scope can be different in every implementation.
What have been your experiences? Do you have any best practices or recommendations which should be followed during upgrade engagements?
Nilesh Makhija
