As many of you know we’re hard at work on NOFX and the release is looking really good – lots of cool improvements, including video playback. Some of you have noticed that the Linux version has fallen behind, leading to some heated, but healthy debate internally about how to prioritize the development hopper.

After careful consideration, we’ve come to the painful conclusion that we should discontinue support for the Linux version of Songbird. Some of you may wonder how a company with deep roots in Open Source could drop Linux and we want you to know it isn’t without heartache.
 We have a small engineering team here at Songbird, and, more than ever, must stay very focused on a narrow set of priorities. Trying to deliver a raft of new features around all media types, and across a growing list of devices, we had to make some tough choices.

While our Linux users are some of the most passionate, do some killer development, and always provide tremendous input as to whether we’re on the right path or not, we simply can’t continue to support a Linux version as we have in the past.

And, like you, we can’t stand to see our Linux product be anything less than outstanding. Unfortunately, we can’t make that happen right now. Trade-offs are hard, and this is one of the most painful decisions in the history of the company.

We remain loyal to Linux and the ideology it represents, so we will maintain a version of the software for use by our Songbird engineers who develop on the Linux platform. We’ll make that version available to the community. We will keep Linux build bots and host the Linux builds on the developer wiki. That said, those builds will not be tested and may not pick up new features developed by Songbird’s team.

When we roll out NOFX for Windows and Mac at the end of the month, you’ll see video support – import, library management and full screen playback. We are also working on full compatibility with Windows 7 as well as support for a range of new handsets.

UPDATED 4/5/2010 @ 2:22 pm PST

To those who voiced their disappointment and retained a civil tone, we
empathize with you. We appreciate all of the passion from the community, we again want to re-iterate that this was a very tough decision for us. We want to clarify a couple of points:

• Songbird remains open source. The code is mirrored from our working tree and available at http://publicsvn.songbirdnest.com/
• We are maintaining our Linux build infrastructure and will ensure that it continues to compile and run the unit-test suite. http://buildbot.songbirdnest.com/
• Nightly Linux builds will remain available at http://developer.songbirdnest.com/builds/trunk/latest/
• We have in house developers that use Linux every day and they will keep developing Songbird on Linux.

We also want to share some facts that may bring additional perspective about our decision.

(1) Measured by application usage on at least 3 distinct days within 30-day period
(2) Measured by OS user agent used by community reporting a bug in last 30 days
(3) Measured by OS user agent used when add-on was submitted to addons.songbirdnest.com in last 30 days
(4) Measured by OS user agent used when translation was submitted to translate.songbirdnest.com in last 30 days
(5) Google Analytics data for visits to getsongbird.com for year 2009
(6) Percentage share of OS from web clients (source wikipedia.org)

Comments for this post will close on Tuesday 4/6 @ 5 pm PST.

Over the years, we’ve taken pride in making our tools, product and development process, as open and transparent as possible. Our tools (Bugzilla, Litmus, Wiki) are publicly accessible, our source code open (svn) and we’ve blogged on many occasions about our Agile practices.

Today we’re taking a step further by publishing our Development Survival Guide. This presentation is an internal step-by-step guide that we take new engineers thru during their orientation. It’s a good summary of what to expect on a day-to-day basis as an engineer working at Songbird (other than daily Fussball tournament and unfettered access to the beer stocked mini-fridge). It’s your opportunity to take a peek from within.

Want get even closer? Apply for one of our openings.

Download Songbird Development Survival Guide 1.2 in pdf.

Fortunately, the metrics gathered during each Agile release cycle can be very helpful for that purpose. Once we gain a good understanding on what is being worked on, for how long and by how many people, we should be able to extrapolate this to forecast future releases.

Let’s take a look at what activities take place during a typical release cycle:

1) Plan release
2) Write code
3) Test
4) Fix bugs

Then repeat ad nauseam.

In that context, the programming tasks can be categorized as follow:

1. Planned work

This is the body of work identified during the planning stage. This is the raison d’être of the release. For the most part, this covers new features or less tangible things such as performance improvements. This is what we’ll want to talk about when the product gets released. It’s an easy planning trap to think that this is the only work required.

2. Unplanned work

As the name implies, this is work that was unforeseen at the beginning of the release but is required to be completed before the product can ship. It can be further refined as follow:

a) Change in requirements
This should not be unexpected. In fact, any Agile methodology assumes that there will be changes down the road. This is not a problem per se as long as there is a mechanism to trade features, extend duration or increase resources.

b) Omissions in planning
Because the planning period is relatively short, it is assumed that not everything is fully specified or researched upfront. As development proceeds, new pieces are discovered and introduced into the plan.

3. Bugs

Defects can be considered a side effect of software development. They can affect the product in different ways:

a) Regression
These are defects introduced when working on new code. They usually impact unrelated functionality that used to work before.

b) Defect in new feature
These are problems in a newly coded feature. The feature does not work quite as expected.

c) Existing bug
These are bugs present in the previous version of the software. They are either known or newly discovered during the course of the release and prioritized to be fixed now because they affect existing users.

Learning from the past to project in the future

A believable long term plan needs to layout new features on a timeframe against a set of resources. Because there is only a limited amount of time and people allocated to thinking through the issues upfront, the initial estimates are always very rough. It is then very difficult to predict how much time certain things will take or how many people will be required. To increase accuracy, you’d have to invest more time and resources, which is not practical, mostly because these are the very same resources that are critical to deliver against the current release plan.

You need a model to help forecast based on imperfect data. You could decide to simply pad all the current estimates, but you’d still need to figure out a factor that’s sufficient.

A better model is to find a way to anticipate the additional work that will be generated by the introduction of a brand new feature. With that model, we can layout a plan that should allow sufficient room in every release to accommodate for all the work, planned, unplanned and bugs.

Let’s take a look at historical data from previous Songbird releases:

The first row in the table contains the budgeted points for each release. That number represents the sum of all planned work as determined at the end of the planning phase for that release. The release schedule was set based on that number and the historical team velocity.

The second row represents the total actual points completed during the release, including features and bugs. This represents that amount of effort to get the release out.

The third row represents the actual completed feature points only. Next row computes ratio of planned vs. actual work.

It’s very tempting to compute a velocity based on total completed points and use it as a predictor for how much work the team can accomplish. While it’s true that it is a measure of total effort, it can’t be used against planned work only.

What we want to determine is that given 1 point of planned feature work, how much unplanned work and bugs will be generated and thus how long will it take to complete. Then normalize this for team size and you get a factor that can be used for long term planning.

To get there, I’ve computed a velocity for each release based on planned work divided by actual release duration (in days) and number of engineers. I then use the median value across release as a factor to turn estimated planned points into calendar days. With that in hand, I created a simple model where scope, duration and resources are linked. Set two values and the third one gets computed automatically. This model becomes very handy to run through what-if scenario during roadmap sessions. It provides answers to business questions such as: “How long would it take to do feature X?”, “Can you meet deadline Y?”, “How many more engineers would it take to do Z in Y time frame?”.

Hope you enjoyed learning more about our approach to the difficult task of long term planning. I’d be interested to hear about how you’ve approached the problem, so feel free to share your story.

Lastly, let’s remember the words of the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr:

“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”

Songbird Release Trains

We concluded that a dashboard that was more dynamic and worked in real time with Bugzilla would provide a more accurate picture of development progress. This is an overview of the couple of extensions we added to the tool.

Dashboard

The dashboard focuses on the current iteration (all P1 stories/tasks/bugs for a release target milestone). It provides a transparent and dynamic view of what’s under active development for the week.

Items are grouped by developer so we can easily review what each person is working on in this iteration. There are few additions that make it more useful than a plain Bugzilla query. When an item is carried over from a previous iteration, it gets highlighted, providing visibility on something that may require more work than anticipated or might be blocked by some dependencies. That kind of view was lacking before and it made it difficult to figure out what was happening when tasks got carried over. Similarly, when a new task gets added to the plan mid-iteration, it’s identified as such, making the tracking of intake very easy.

Because of our code review system, often time tasks are completed from a programmer standpoint but can’t be checked in until a positive review (R+) is performed by someone else. Additionally, some code requires the re-compilation of large amounts of 3rd party libraries before the patch is available. This kind of information is now bubbled up on the tracking page so the exact status of a particular issue is visible at a quick glance.

Iteration Dashboard

This dashboard is helping us to know what everyone is doing at any given time. It fosters a sense of accountability and ownership of the issues and provides a sense of accomplishment when the work is completed.

Below is a view of the legend for the Dashboard. Most attributes for an item are extracted from Bugzilla and represented via an icon.

Dashboard Legend

Punchlist

Once a release reaches QA, a release branch is cut and the focus of the team switches from working on planned features to fixing bugs. We found that this period is best managed by using a punch list which contains all the issues remaining to be resolved before the release can ship as opposed to a weekly plan of what gets accomplished for the period. It keeps the team focused on the entirety of what’s on our collective plate. During that period, issues are being promoted to Blocker status to represent what is blocking the next milestone (e.g. Beta, RC, Final). It also signals what can be landed on the branch automatically and what needs further clearance. This allows us to throttle the rate of change being introduced into the source tree so that QA can be ensured stable builds.

Release Punchlist

When in punchlist mode, it’s critical that all issues are being assigned. The list reflects that by highlighting items that have no owner yet.

Pretty Graphs

Two frequently tracked Agile metrics are Burndown and Velocity. Those are now being graphed automatically for each release. The Burndown helps forecast when the work will be completed. The Velocity gives us a historical perspective on what the team was able to accomplish and thus helps us plan better.

The Burndown graph breaks down tasks (what we refer to as “planned work”) from bugs (unplanned consequences of software development). When the Burndown line cross the horizontal axis, we’re done. Notice in the graph below the bug points going up during the QA period.

Burndown Graph

The Velocity graph plots the team velocity, normalized per day. Actual Velocity is computed at the end of each iteration and plotted along side the Planned Velocity for easy comparison.

Velocity Graph

These new tools provide a dynamic view of the state of the release. They bring transparency into the development process for everyone involved.

We’d like the help of the community to test and provide feedback on a couple of new features we’ve been working on:

• USB Mass Storage Device Support (Windows only):
  Songbird now supports file transfer and track sync for USB mass storage devices (with the addition of the MSC add-on).
• Mozilla strings localization
  We’ve added support for localization of the Mozilla specific UI found in XULRunner. We’ve integrated all the languages available from Mozilla, so if you’re using Songbird in German, French, Spanish or Japanese, you will now experience a fully localized UI. See the complete list of language codes we picked up from Mozilla.

The release notes contain additional details about this build including a list of known issues.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla. Thanks.

Songbird 1.2 focuses on improving library management and provides full integration with iTunes, in case you want to live in both worlds. We continue to listen to your feedback on Get Satisfaction, our blog and Bugzilla. Please let us know what’s important to you.

New Features

Automatically Organize Library Files
Songbird can now automatically organize the files that are contained in your library. Once enabled, it will consolidate your media in one location. You can customize the structure of the folder and file names based on metadata contained in every track.

2-way Sync with iTunes
If you’re using iTunes Music Store to purchase content, you can now automatically expose iTunes library tracks and playlists into Songbird. You can also export tracks and playlists added to Songbird back into iTunes, so that they can easily be synced to your iPhone or iPod touch.

Last.fm Radio
Last.fm Radio supports artist, tag, and user stations, mapping station links on the Last.fm website to play internally in Songbird. It includes the Radio Directory allowing you to conveniently browse and explore the tag and artist relationships on Last.fm. Additionally, the Radio directory includes quick links for playing stations based on your Last.fm library, your Songbird library, and friends/neighbors’ libraries.

10-band Equalizer
Now you can tweak the frequency response of the audio playback to match your room’s acoustics or your personal preferences.

Performance Enhancements

We’ve continued to make the application more stable and zippier in all sorts of ways. Mainly:

• Faster search
• Deleting many tracks at once is faster
• Selecting a large amount of tracks from the library is no longer slow
• Reduced the amount of threads required to be running at all times by 50%
• Fewer Crashes: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix some of the most common crashes in Songbird.

What’s Next

Our goal is to continue to focus on building a world-class, open music player. Our next release will consist of continued focus on performance and stability gains, implementing additional audio features, and much more. Stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date, or if you like to live dangerously check out one of our nightly builds and see the progress for yourself!

We’re always interested in hearing your feedback so please comment below and file bugs and/or feature requests in Bugzilla.

Here are the most noteworthy and complete features we’d like to call out in this Beta and get your feedback on:

• 2-way Sync with iTunes
  If you’re using iTunes Music Store to purchase content, you can now automatically expose iTunes library tracks and playlists into Songbird. You can also export tracks and playlists added to Songbird back into iTunes, so that they can easily be synced to your iPhone or iPod touch.

The Beta 2 release notes contain additional details about this build including a list of known issues.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before the final release.

Here are the most noteworthy and complete features we’d like to call out in this Beta and get your feedback on:

• Automatically Organize Library Files:
  Songbird can now automatically organize the files that are contained in your library. Once enabled, it will consolidate your media in one location. You can customize the structure of the folder and file names based on metadata contained in every track.
• 10-band Equalizer
  Now you can tweak the frequency response of the audio playback to match your room’s acoustics or your personal preferences.
• Last.fm Radio:
  Last.fm Radio supports artist, tag, and user stations, mapping station links on the Last.fm website to play internally in Songbird. It includes the Radio Directory allowing you to conveniently browse and explore the tag and artist relationships on Last.fm. Additionally, the Radio directory includes quick links for playing stations based on your Last.fm library, your Songbird library, and friends/neighbors’ libraries.

The Beta 1 release notes contain additional details about this build including a list of known issues.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before the final release.

Almost a million people have given Songbird 1.0 a warm welcome. We thank you for that. We’ve listened to your feedback on Get Satisfaction, our blog and Bugzilla.
We want to keep bringing out the innovation you deserve. Here is your Songbird 1.1.

New Features

On demand Fetching of Album Artwork
Songbird can now fetch album artwork from the web at your command. Simply select or right-click a track and choose “Get Album Artwork”. You can also select your preferred source of artwork. By default, Songbird will retrieve album artwork from Last.fm but you can install other sources such as amazon.com via an add-on.

Watch Folders
You can choose to watch a folder hierarchy for changes and the content will auto-magically be imported in your library. If a file is removed from the watched folder, the corresponding track will be deleted from your Library.

Better Sorting
Library sorting supports unicode collation and better handling of leading definite and indefinite articles such as “The” and “a”.

Replay gain support (normalization)
If a track’s metadata contains replay gain (including iTunes-specific) information, Songbird will adjust the playback gain appropriately.

Improved Media Core & Better gapless playback
We rewrote the low level media core component for Windows to improve playback performance and lower cpu usage. Also, if an mp3 encoder places metadata information to indicate the exact beginning and end of the audio, Songbird is able to read it and use it to skip padding data that does not contain audio, leading to perfect gapless playback.

MTP Device Support
We fixed many bugs affecting MTP devices on Windows. We’ve also added the ability to synch authorized Windows Media DRM’ed content to your MTP device. To see if your MTP device is supported, or to report your findings, visit the MTP device page.

7digital MP3 Store (Beta)
Buy high quality MP3s (up to 320kbps) from the 7digital store in Songbird. The 7digital store in Songbird uses your most recently played tracks to recommend albums to you. Plus, 7digital contributes a portion of every purchase back to Songbird’s development. Every song you buy supports your favorite artist AND our development. Woot! The UK store is fully stocked, but the US and other European stores are still continuing to populate a complete catalog of music.

Performance Enhancements

We’ve continued to make the application more stable and zippier in all sorts of ways. Amongst other things, you should notice a smaller memory footprint and decreased CPU usage.

We made some substantial gains this release:

• Reduced memory use with a large library by 40%
• Cut CPU usage during playback by half
• Fixed playback memory leaks
• Made library caching configurable
• Added batching to the media importer, reducing memory use by 60%
• Reduced Mac download size 45%
• Fewer Crashes: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix ten of the most common crashes in Songbird.

For Developers

• You can now invoke Songbird from a url. For instance,

  songbird:open?url=http%3A%2F%2Flast.fm

  will launch Songbird and open a new tab pointing to http://last.fm. For more information, review this article in our developer section.

What’s Next

Our goal is to continue to focus on building a world-class, open music player. Our next release will consist of continued focus on performance and stability gains, implementing additional audio features, and much more. Stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date, or if you like to live dangerously check out one of our nightly builds and see the progress for yourself!

We’re always interested in hearing your feedback so please comment below and file bugs and/or feature requests in Bugzilla.

Thanks to everyone who has been providing feedback to our latest Beta. This update contains bug fixes and final tweaks. We’re closing in on a Final build and would like to make sure that you don’t see anything you might consider a show stopper.

The Beta 3 release notes contain additional details about this build including a list of known issues.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before the final release.