I wanted to add a little comment/question in general about our release process:
Right now we typically have a one-month overlap between releases. That being the case, if you are focusing on the current release until it is out the door, you effectively lose a month of development for the future release. It might be tempting during this one-month time period to focus instead on the future release and leave the current release alone. Would it make sense to keep a four-month release cycle, but not have an overlapping month of two releases? Just a thought On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 10:42 AM, David Nalley <da...@gnsa.us> wrote: > The RC7 vote thread contained a lot of discussion around release > cadence, and I figured I'd move that to a thread that has a better > subject so there is better visibility to list participants who don't > read every thread. > > When I look at things schedule wise, I see our aims and our reality. > We have a relatively short development window (in the schedule) and we > have almost 50% of our time in the schedule allocated to testing. > (over two months). However, it seems that a lot of testing - or at > least a lot of testing for what became blockers to the release didn't > appear to happen until RCs were kicked out - and that's where our > schedule has fallen apart for multiple releases. The automated tests > we have were clean when we issued RCs, so we clearly don't have the > depth needed from an automated standpoint. > > Two problems, one cultural and one technical. The technical problem is > that our automated test suite isn't deep enough to give us a high > level of confidence that we should release. The cultural problem is > that many of us wait until the release period of the schedule to test. > > What does that have to do with release cadence? Well inherently not > much; but let me describe my concerns. As a project; the schedule is > meaningless if we don't follow it; and effectively the release date is > held hostage. Personally, I do want as few bugs as possible, but it's > a balancing act where people doubt our ability if we aren't able to > ship. I don't think it matters if we move to 6 month cycles, if this > behavior continues, we'd miss the 6 month date as well and push to 8 > or 9 months. See my radical proposition at the bottom for an idea on > dealing with this. > > I also find myself agreeing with Daan on the additional complexity. > Increasing the window for release inherently increases the window for > feature development. As soon as we branch a release, master is open > for feature development again. This means a potential for greater > change at each release. Change is a risk to quality; or at least an > unknown that we again have to test. The greater that quantity of > change, the greater the potential threat to quality. > > Radical proposition: > > Because we have two problems, of different nature, we are in a > difficult situation. This is a possible solution, and I'd appreciate > you reading and considering it. Feedback is welcome. I propose that > after we enter the RC stage that we not entertain any bugs as blockers > that don't have automated test cases associated with them. This means > that you are still welcome to do manual testing of your pet feature > and the things that are important to you; during the testing window > (or anytime really). However, if the automation suite isn't also > failing then we consider the release as high enough quality to ship. > This isn't something we can codify, but the PMC can certainly adopt > this attitude as a group when voting. Which also means that we can > deviate from it. If you brought up a blocker for release - we should > be immediately looking at how we can write a test for that behavior. > This should also mean several other behaviors need to become a valid > part of our process. We need to ensure that things are well tested > before allowing a merge. This means we need a known state of master, > and we need to perform testing that allows us to confirm that a patch > does no harm. We also need to insist on implementation of > comprehensive tests for every inbound feature. > > Thoughts, comments, flames, death threats? :) > > --David > -- *Mike Tutkowski* *Senior CloudStack Developer, SolidFire Inc.* e: mike.tutkow...@solidfire.com o: 303.746.7302 Advancing the way the world uses the cloud<http://solidfire.com/solution/overview/?video=play> *(tm)*
