FME Blog

742 (or FME 2013 by the Numbers)

Dale Lutz

January 16, 2013•4 min

Yesterday we formally released FME 2013, starting the day with a webcast of Don and I’s “most favourite things”. While preparing for the event, I found many ways to measure...

Yesterday we formally released FME 2013, starting the day with a webcast of Don and I’s “most favourite things”. While preparing for the event, I found many ways to measure FME 2013:

1		Launch day
3		Percent quicker than FME 2012 through comparable automated testing
6		Platforms supported (in various ways) (including iOS and Android)
15		Months of active development
99		Servers (real and virtual) in the build and test cluster
261		Builds produced
303		Formats shipped
742		Items included in the 2013 “What’s New”
964		Unique customer requests resolved *
1,982		In-person attendees giving feedback at the 38 FME User Meetings held during calendar 2012
3,132		FME installers built (across all products and platforms)
5,052		Documented development tasks closed **
8,425		Automated tests run daily (a further 2,080 are run at weekends)
10,230		Source code check-ins made
14,000		Cups of coffee consumed ***
28,000		CPU hours of automated testing
51,406		Person-hours estimated effort in development (about 25 years on a 40 hourweek)
400,000		Data points per build

Yes, I know, I also did this a couple of years ago… but thanks to Safe’s Build and Release team for gathering all of these numbers and keeping the machine grinding the product day in and out.

When putting together yesterday’s presentation, the one thing that Don and I wrestled with was the 742. Not only is it 700 more than the answer to life, the universe, and everything, which is impressive by itself, 742 is the number of items that were deemed worthy of recording in our “What’s New” list. Every one of those 742 is important to at least some user out there, every one of the 742 was sweated over, tested, documented, and perfected by our team. Every one of the 742 encapsulates a bit of the life energy of the people who worked on it.

How could we possibly do justice to each of those items in the 50 or so minutes we have? By my math, that is about 4 seconds per item. And while Don and I are known for speaking at a good Canadian clip, this would be too much even for us.

So I thought I’d make a Wordle that would at least attempt to show the scope of what the team had accomplished, which it nicely does. And then, in the end, we just picked some favorites to go into more detail on, knowing that we were leaving huge swaths of extremely powerful and useful functionality unmentioned.

So here are my conclusions: First off, to those Safers who worked on things that didn’t get mentioned, and to those customers whose great suggestions we implemented but didn’t call out yesterday, I thank you for your work and your creativity. And I apologize for not being able to give each item the time it deserved.

Secondly, yesterday’s webinar wasn’t the end of the story. To those readers interested in exploring how FME 2013 can make you more productive, and solve more problems in ever quicker times, there are plenty of options:

the What’s Great in FME 2013 page
the recording from yesterday’s FME 2013 Unveiling webcast,
the dueling FME Server 2013 and FME Desktop 2013 deep dive webinars,
the FME 2013 Contest,
the Launch FME Insider Newsletter,
the FME 2013 YouTube videos,
the FME Evangelist blog posts,
the FME Community Answers site,
the ongoing FME webinars,
and the FME World Tour 2013

Taken together these will provide ample opportunity to really see all that FME 2013 has to offer.

Lastly, just get the product. Try it out. Explore it. If we’ve done our job, it should *just work*. And at the end of the day, that’s really all the matters.