There’s lots of good things about the iterative development model. You start with something very basic, and slowly build it up, adding layers of functionality, optimisation or polish – testing and retesting with your customers to ensure that the software and their needs are coming into congruence.

And then there’s Second Life’s software development, which is sort of iterative, but just seems to stop dead on release.

Second Life’s features iterate through previews, betas and release-candidates, all the way up to the point that the feature is actually released to the broader customer-base for the first time and then… development stops – unless there’s some serious bugs that need fixing, in which case they’re gotten to… eventually.

And there’s the thing. In iterative development, the release in front of the customers is just a step towards a goal. That goal being a level of polish where the customers can (metaphorically) see their faces in it.

Second Life’s features don’t seem to get that polish. A feature gets a version one release, and then development rushes off in some other direction, without sticking around to assess, refine, adapt, optimise and polish the feature. It remains a sheenless first-revision until eventually someone comes along and replaces it with something entirely different (cf. Second Life Viewer 2).

There’s a reason that Second Life often seems so rough and unpolished. That’s because it is. It’s composed mostly of rough parts that just haven’t really seen any dedicated iteration since release. It always seems as if someone planned to do more, but it just never really happened.

Actually providing customers with features that gleam with ongoing attention would probably make a heck of a difference to just about every part of Second Life.

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Tags: Opinion, Second Life, Second Life viewer, Second Life viewer 2, software, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds