How often we ship Tableau, a test perspective

If you look at Tableau closely, it's obvious - and we make the claim - we ship a new version of Tableau every quarter.  But from the test point of view, we ship much more often.  Here's what is looks like from our point of view.

Imagine you own a textbook publishing company. Each quarter, you release a new textbook covering some new topic you have not covered before.  An example might be Astronomy: The Mountains of Mars from Winter 2017 and  Egyptian History out in Spring 2018.

At the same time you are ready to ship the Egyptian History book, though, the Mars explorer finds enough data to cause you to need to update one of the chapters of the Mars Mountain book.  So for Spring 2018, you have 2 books you need to send out the door: the new Egypt book and an updated version of the Mars book. 

Your proofreaders will need to focus most of their time on the new book but still must devote some amount of time to validating the text and layout of the updated chapter of the Mars book.  Additionally, the new chapter might change the page count of the Mars book.  If so, you might need to bind the book differently.  If there are new photos, you may want to update the cover or back of the book.  The table of contents might change, and the index will likely need to be updated. 

A test case for the index might be to validate the previous contents are intact after the new chapter index is inserted.  If the size of the index no longer fits on the current set of pages, you will need to rebind the book, shrink the index or otherwise resolve this dilemma.  And the proofreaders, who might have naively thought they needed to verify only the new chapter contents, potentially have to validate the entire Mars book.

Testing is in the same position.  While our focus is typically on the new versions of Tableau we release every quarter, we also continue to support the last few years' worth of releases. That means in addition to testing the "major" release of Tableau, we have to test the updates we consistently ship as well.  So from my point of view, always have multiple releases we have to validate.  And that means that we ship far more often than once per quarter.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John