We got it out the door today

and it wasn't even that painful. Ummm what am I talking about? Software release number 1 under my control .

I got to the office this morning and found an email awaiting me that said the tooing and froing about a portion of the release (between two developers) was over and it was ready for the big time. Included in the email were exact instructions from one of the developers about which files I needed to get from SourceSafe to create the installer. So I go to our build machine and 'get' the installer script for that product. It has references to drive H. It turns out that when that developers machine was built there was some kind of USB device exposing multiple logical devices and the XP install saw them first - so his drives C to G are USB devices and his hard disk is drive H. Now you'd imagine that this shouldn't present a problem. After all we all of us use relative paths and we never hard code drive letters right? Right!

Alas, the build product I chose (Visual Build Pro version 5.5), whilst an otherwise excellent product and warmly recommended, insists on having a drive letter as part of every path. I can think of good reasons for this and good reasons against this.

So it's about 10:00 AM. The timestamp on the email telling me which files I need to get is 4:37 AM so I know the poor bugger was up late. I decided to wait until about noon but he rang me a little earlier than that to check what was happening. At this point we have a choice; we can spend most of the day working out what to do and possibly miss shipping yet again or we can do whatever it takes to get it out today and worry about it tomorrow. Part of me says we spend the time to get it right the first time (in terms of the build process). Another part of me says that from the customers point of view they don't care about our build process - they care about getting functional software. My arguments about not releasing whilst we're working through issues with the software don't hold when we're discussing the build process so I decide we'll hack his install scripts to get a working installer that 'does the right things' and 'we'll fix the scripts tomorrow'.

A bit of tooing and froing and we have an installer that installs his software. A bit more tooing and froing and we have a complete set of manuals. I do a couple of test burns of the complete suite and run my standard tests and we're good to go! It's now about 3:30 PM.

So I burn 10 cd's and print 10 labels. 4 cd's go to one location, 2 each go to 2 other locations, one goes home with me (I like trophies) and one goes into our physical library at the office. Each cd passes burn verification and also is readable on other PC's.

So now I've got 10 cd's and 10 labels. Do you remember a post I made a day or two ago about how this was going to be our first release with professional looking deliverables? You'll never guess what I overlooked. Not in a million years. Our cd contains professional looking manuals, professional looking software. When you stick it in the CD drive autostart takes over and pulls up a somewhat spartan but nonetheless professional looking web page with our company logo and a bunch of links to install the software or read the manuals.

I apply the label to the first CD and sit back examining it. Damn damn damn. The one thing I didn't think about was this: when I did my first test run two days ago I'd used a Memorex CD. They have silver printing that doesn't show through the labels. On Tuesday I went to Staples to get a bunch of Jewel Cases and found they had a special - Jewel Case AND blank CD-R for about the same price I'd pay for the Jewel Case. So I got the combo (shrink wrapped) without checking what was printed on the label side of the CD. So we've got this white label on the CD and clearly visible through it is the Staples logo. To make it worse, the large black Staples logo was obviously seen by me as I inserted each CD into the burner and it STILL didn't click. It's now 4:30 PM and there ain't enough time to get more blank labels, a bunch of blank CD-R's without anything printed on the label side, burn the buggers and make the Fedex pickup time. So our first CD release had to go out with the Staples logo clearly visible through the label.