Milestones and Glass Houses

Prepare To Submit
Milestones and Glass Houses
Introduction
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Conclusion

Would you put your money into something sight unseen? Well, you might risk a few hundred dollars on a friend's hot stock tip. But what if it were a few hundred thousand dollars? No, of course not. You would want to thoroughly check into the investment first, which is why publishers require developers to submit milestones to them for evaluation.

Now, developers desperately want publishers to pay money for delivery of their milestones. But publishers won't give up the money until after verifying that the milestones are what they are suppose to be. So you would think developers would do everything in their power to make it easy for the publisher to evaluate the milestone as quickly as possible, right?

Actually, you might be surprised how difficult some developers make it to evaluate milestones. Some developers submit milestones that require the installation of a specific version of some obscure third-party software, but they do not go to the trouble of providing copies of the software itself. Some developers send in milestones that have been "zipped" across thirty floppy disks (and there's always a zip error on disk number twenty-nine). Some developers submit milestones on Syquest disks or Exobyte tapes without first checking whether the publisher has the necessary equipment for reading the media. Then there are the developers who put 100 megabyte files on their ftp sites and expect the publisher to make the effort of downloading them.

For any developer who is serious about making it easy for the publisher to pay them on time, I strongly recommend investing a few thousand dollars on a CD-ROM burner early into the project. I also recommend - I'm about to commit sacrilege here - that the developer include an installer with each programming milestone. Most developers don't create an installer until the Alpha or Beta milestone, but an installer can cut hours or days out of the evaluation process - especially if the publisher needs to put the milestone on many different computer systems.

One trick for speeding up the payment process employed by many developers I've known is to submit an invoice for the milestone a couple of weeks before the milestone submission itself. The theory is that this will allow a check to be ready by the time the milestone arrives. Of course, they assume that the publisher will immediately approve the milestone upon submission. Unfortunately, that's not always the case, as we will see in the next section.
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