[testacon]

Originally Posted by tokuzumi

Also, if anyone has ever worked or dealt with IT in a large organization, there is all kinds of red tape that must be unraveled. There's scope documents, and justification documents. Those documents must get sign off. Project plans are written. Those must get approval. Cost estimates are, well, estimated. There are resource concerns that are brought out in these meetings. Once all that documentation gets finalized, which can take months, the actual coding begins. Should there be any deviations from the initial plan, those must be written, and submitted for approval. Once the coding is done, QA begins. During QA, bugs are documented, sent back to the developers to be fixed, and a new timeline for QA is set. This goes back to QA, and the cycle repeats until a finished product is signed off. Then it gets released.

How it happens here: A dev downloads the latest rom, sits down at a computer, and starts tinkering. They do a release and pray. The process repeats until it goes from WIP to ROM status.

If HTC did the PPCGeeks/XDA way, they would have been out of business a long time ago. Also, if the devs here went to work at HTC, the process and amount of time to release new official updates would be the same. I say we keep our devs here, and let HTC have theirs.

I'm pretty sure that outside of the QA portion, all of the "red tape" as you called it is hammered out prior to buying the phones. Sprint knew that Froyo/Gingerbread is coming out prior to the phones release. I'm sure they worked out software upgrade costs prior to them stamping the Sprint logo on the phones. If they didn't HTC probably would take them to the cleaners every time they want to upgrade something.