The $60,000 "First Customer Ship" Clock
A co-worker at Apple recently asked about a detail of the Software Lifecycle. "What is 'Mastering?'" I got to the Slack message a bit late; they had already followed up with, "Nevermind, someone else told me, lol." I advised them that according to Apple's REJI standards that "Mastering" was a deprecated term, and they should use "Image Assembly, and further, the "Golden Master"or "GM"--formerly a revered label for something special in the software industry--should be called the "First Customer Ship" release. It will take though, many years I believe, to purge those terms, "Mastering" and "Golden Master" not only from speech, but from lots of software production tools and documentation. Origins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastering_(audio) In software the final version of a release, being the “Release Candidate” (RC) which will become the First Customer Ship (“FCS” as noun or ve...