Quality is a Feature

Movable Type was originally built as a hobby, at a time when asking users to upgrade frequently was a fun part of participating in the blogging community, not a burden. At the time, there wasn't even an idea that blogging would become an industry.

In that environment, there were different expectations for the product. Commercial users were rare and most people who installed and used the product tended to be highly tech-oriented. Most people who have used Movable Type know its quirks and know how to work around them and there are little nagging issues that we, as early users and developers, have all grown to accept. Unfortunately, as a new generation of customers discover the platform, these idiosyncrasies become less endearing and more of a headache.

About five months ago, as the Movable Type team developed the roadmap for future versions of the product, they also evaluated Movable Type and its core code. A decision was made that, before we added the features on the roadmap, we first needed to step back to address and fix the issues (bugs and oddities) that we already knew about. The community has provided, through bug reports and feedback, a great springboard for this. But we also did something new for the first time — we decided to invest in something more than public beta tests: we hired a professional quality assurance team to discover new bugs.

For the past couple months, the two teams have been discovering and fixing bugs, making performance enhancements and working on making the Movable Type code base even more robust, stable and secure than before.

In retrospect, in our desire to get 3.0 and 3.1 out to market, we lost track of our commitment to quality. We learned through this process that shiny features aren't worth a damn unless they work well. With Movable Type 3.16, we believe that we're getting back to the quality of code that our users had grown to expect. Even though it's just a point release, I believe it's a turning point for Movable Type as a professional product.

This release alone fixes over 100 known issues, quirks and bugs — these have been documented thoroughly in our change log. These aren't only issues introduced in 3.0, however. The QA team managed to find — and we addressed — quirks and bugs that have floated around in the product since nearly day one. It's remarkable what a team with a new perspective on the product can discover.

More details about this all can be found in this post on the Movable Type site.