Update on the delivery of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0

Last week, the PTC Executive team met to review the progress of the Pro/E Wildfire 5.0 release. As a reminder, we provided a lot of information about Pro/E Wildfire 5.0 at the PTC/USER world event last month. There was quite a bit of coverage about it, such as this report by Kenneth Wong, and this one by Jeff Rowe. There are also a few nice videos about Pro/E Wildfire 5.0 available online, such as this one that was shown during Brian Shepherd's presentation, and this one done recently by John Buchowski.

While at PTC/USER we announced that the product would be available to customers "later this summer". Specifically, we were hoping it would be ready for shipment by July, and last week's Product Lifecycle Review Board (PLRB) meeting was to review our progress toward meeting our release criteria, and hopefully approve the release for distribution.

As I described in one of my presentations at PTC/USER, many years ago PTC changed the way we develop and release software products. We do not ship software on a particular, predetermined date. We ship software when it meets a variety of release criteria... (Think Paul Masson – “We'll sell no wine before it's time.”) There are about 30 or so specific QA-related metrics that we track throughout the Development and Stabilization periods of the Software Engineering Process. For each of the past three releases, we have systematically tightened those criteria - and in each release demanded that R&D deliver higher and higher quality software. When Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 was evaluated last week, we saw that two of those criteria were not yet met. While it would be easy to look at those results and declare them close enough, we did not. (In fact, one of those metrics, Mean Time to Failure, is at the same threshold as it was when we shipped Wildfire 4.0, but since we’ve tightened the criteria, that’s no longer good enough.)

We could have issued an exception. We did not.

We could have come up with a variety of plausible explanations as to why the criteria was not met. We did not.

We could even argue that the criterion should be changed. We did not.

We have made a commitment to ourselves, our management, and most importantly to our customer, and we will meet that commitment.

Our goal is continuous software quality improvement, and Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 will not be shipped until its ready.

The bad news is that you'll need to wait a bit longer for this highly anticipated release. The good news is that we’ll re-evaluate our progress in a few weeks. While we are all disappointed with the schedule delay being so close to the expected release date, we have set high expectations with ourselves and our customers regarding quality, and we will meet or exceed those goals. Period.

With the commitment that R&D and QA have made, I am confident that we will have the product in the market by the end of the quarter.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy your summer vacations (or your winter ones, for my friends down under), and I look forward to sharing more news about Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 as the release gets closer to delivery.

All the best,

~ Mike

Staying Current....

I've just put the finishing touches on one of the presentations I will be giving at the PTC/USER event in Orlando next week.  (Of course, I still have more to prepare, but I wanted to take a minute and celebrate this achievement!)  The topic I'll be covering in this session is "Staying Current".  Not on Twitter or Facebook or CNN or anywhere else online for that matter, but on the latest technology.

I want to share some thinking around the challenges of keeping up to date with the latest software, specifically with Pro/ENGINEER.  We spend literally millions of dollars over many months, developing new releases of software products at PTC.  We manage every phase of the software development process with extreme care, diligence and oversight, all to ensure that what we delivery meets our goals for that product.  Then we release it to the market.  It shows up on our website for you to download....  And then we wait.  

We wait to see what you'll do with it.  Will you embrace it, and deploy it right away?   Will it immediately impact the way you run your business, or do your job?  Will you be thrilled that we delivered the improvement you've been hoping for?   Or not.

Will you be unable to deploy it?  Does it not run in your environment?  Is it in incompatible with your existing hardware or OS?  Other 3rd party software?  Other PTC software?  Is it too hard to justify the effort and expense of deploying a new release?

These are the topics I'd like to explore during my talk at PTC/USER.  I hope you'll be there, and that you're able to join me on Tuesday at 10:45 in Penzacola F1.  See the entire agenda here.

One aspect of this talk relates to OS and Hardware compatibility.  There's no sense in us releasing software that isn't compatible with your IT environment - Of course you can't deploy it.  So the question is, how can I, as a Product Manager, ensure that I understand your requirements as it relates to hardware and OS?  How can I know what your IT environment is?

Well, a Product Manager's best friend is data.  A Product Manager's job is to provide direction to Developers, so that our software products meet the market's needs.  If a Product Manager doesn't have data to back up his contention on what's important to customers, his or her opinion is just as valid as the Developers.  If those opinions vary - and they sometimes do - and no one has data to back theirs up, then that's trouble!  Therefore, I want data to back up my requirements that we support this OS or that hardware platform.

Of course, Product Managers spend a lot of time with customers.  But with over 100,000 active customers, it's impossible to reach the majority of them.  We conduct surveys, and polls using on-line tools, and gather feedback at live events, but these interactions are with a very small percentage of our overall customer base.  And, one might argue, the customers that we're meeting with and surveying - those that are participating in these forums - are more likely to be leading-edge, and their requirements may not reflect the broader base.

The best answer to these questions comes from an automated mechanism that collects the data we're interested in.  Many companies in the PLM space (Dassault Systemes, for example) and in software more broadly (Google, Microsoft) invite their customers to provide feedback through automated tools.  We're considering implementing such a mechanism - sometimes called "Phone Home" - in Pro/ENGINEER, that would collect benign IT environmental information, such as your OS, hardware type, current release (Pro/E Wildfire 4.0) and datecode (M020).  The mechanism would be enabled by default, but you would have the option to "opt out" if you didn't want Pro/E providing this kind of info back to PTC.

We'd use this information to make better decisions around when to end-of-life R&D support for a particular release, or for a particular OS.  I believe there's great value in this kind of approach for end users, since it ensure that their situation is considered when we make decisions.  However, I am also sensitive to people's concerns about privacy.

Hence the discussion at PTC/USER.  :)  But what about you?  What do you think? Would you share it?  If not, why not?  Let me know if the comments section!

By the way, if you're unable to attend the PTC/USER event, there are lots of ways to stay connected to what's going on there.  Many of us will be tweeting, and blogging from the event.  You can follow me on Twitter @CampbellTweets, and follow everyone else by searching for #ptcuser09.  I'll also be posting here daily.  

Or, you can visit this special page on PTC.com for an aggregation of all posts and tweets from the User Event.

Thanks for reading!

~ Mike

T-9 Days....

...Until PTC/USER 2009 kicks off in sunny (and HOT!) Orlando.

As a Product Manager at PTC, attending any user event is always a great experience.  Attending THIS user event - THE PTC/USER event - is simply incredible.  

It's a great chance for us at PTC to share the latest and greatest news about the products with hundreds and hundreds of users at once.  And this year, we've got a boatload of hot new stuff to tell them about - We will launch Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, we'll give a sneak preview of the next generation of Mathcad, and share a lot of leading edge thinking on the idea of Social Product Development.  Frankly, I can't wait to let everyone know about all of this exciting stuff!

On the other hand, PTC/USER is also a great chance for us in Product Management at PTC to hear what our users are looking for next.  That is, what are the challenges they're facing today, and expect to be facing tomorrow?  What are the next hurdles in Product Development that we can help them clear?  How will the ever-changing technology landscape impact how they want to - and NEED to - develop products?

I'm looking forward to hearing attendees' feedback on these, and a hundred other questions I have for them.  

I'm also looking forward to sharing my perspective on some of what goes on at the event here on this blog.  This is my first experience blogging, but I know that some of the people who I would usually see at this event aren't going to make it this year, and I hope that I can share a little bit of the experience here.

Until next time...

~ Mike