Brian Harry has formally announced a change to the TFS shipping cadence from the traditional 2-3 years to production cycle to a more agile and refreshing minimum once in a 3 weeks cycle! The change didn’t happen over night, it was a gradual process which was greatly influenced by moving TFS to the cloud. The thinking started with trying to figure out what the team wanted.  Like people often do, the team started with what they knew and tried to evolve from there.  The team spent a few months thinking through “What if we do major releases every year and minor releases every 6 months?”,  “Major releases every 6 months, patches once a month?”, “What if we do quarterly releases – can we get the release cycle going that fast?”, etc.  The team also spent time debating what constitutes a major release VS a minor release. How much churn are customers willing to tolerate?  The team finally concluded…

“When a change this big is necessary – forget where you are and just ask where you want to be and then ask what it would take to get there.”

Going forward you will see,

• Team Foundation Service updates every 3 weeks
• Visual Studio Client updates quarterly (Limited to VS 2012 for now)
• Team Foundation Server updates more frequent than every 2 years but details still being worked out.  The team will definitely deliver one this fall.

Refer to the complete blog post from Brian Harry here.