I am a lifetime subscriber and really enjoy using Roon. Thank you!
Though I don’t know for sure if you are, I think that your team is using Agile to develop and enhance Roon. Running with that assumption and in keeping with the spirit of Agile, I like to request that you work towards more frequent releases with Roon.
Many of the software companies here where I live in Silicon Valley release incremental software updates on a bi-weekly schedule and typically release into GA in either a monthly or at the very least a quarterly schedule.
I think that it would be great if Roon were to adopt this same methodology and release smaller features/functionality on a monthly schedule or at least quarterly.
Finally, being in software myself, I know that most companies are rather shy and otherwise keep a roadmap close to the vest. However, I think that providing some idea [even very rough] is important in showing that customers are being heard and provide a window into the future.
Please let me [us] know what you think about these suggestions.
Releases have been much more frequent in the past. Difficult to tell but they probably are slowing to approximately a quarterly basis now:
I don’t think you are ever going to see a roadmap from roon. There are many posts on this over the years and roon have always responded in the same way that roadmaps only ever create negative expectations.
Personally I don’t want a roadmap. I use Roon because I want to listen to music, not follow the details of software development with its inevitable delays and disappointments. It reminds me of the epigram attributed to Bismarck: “Laws are like sausages, best not to see them made.”
The devs have commented in the past that they would prefer to have more regular, smaller releases as projects come to fruition rather than larger “megaversions”. Events, however, often conspire to avoid this goal. For instance recently there has been an active investigation into the source(s) of slow search results in Roon. That is an unforeseen call on resources that I would expect has impacted development and the cadence of substantive version releases.
Monthly substantive releases is probably unrealistic. Testing and reiterating can take up a month of itself.
I tend to agree with @andybob. Even as a software developer myself I dont want or need to see more of the inner workings of Roon or have some vapourware roadmap to obsess over.
I also think that, as I have seen all too often with Microsoft software in my day job, increasing a release cadence does not necessarily give an increase in quality. Quite the opposite to be honest.
Reliability must be an absolute priority since for me Roon is infrastructure, rightly or wrongly. Everything else it does is a bonus.