[bt-devel] Release Cycle Refinement

[Raoul Snyman]

Hi folks,

Martin, Jaak and I had a discussion in IRC today about BibleTime's release 
cycles, and I decided to just e-mail the list with what we'd been talking 
about to get everyone else's opinions.

Currently the release cycle length is 6 weeks. This is fairly short, but was 
meant to counter the previous release "cycles" which seemed to be aligned with 
Debian's release cycles ;-)

However, some folk have expressed concern that they are unable to write some 
of the bigger features, or refactor the code enough to meet the deadline of 
the next feature. Also, some folk expressed concern that the release cycle is 
too short to allow enough time for decent testing.

In addition to this, the packagers have stopped looking at the pre-final 
releases, as they come out too quickly and packagers don't have enough of a 
chance to package each one.

So, with all this in mind, I suggested to Martin that we lengthen the release 
cycle by about 2 weeks, and also do a code-freeze at release candidate stage.

After further discussion between Martin, Jaak and myself, we came to an 
agreement that the 2.4 and 2.5 releases would continue as scheduled, but that 
we'd try a 6 week cycle for 2.6.

Martin suggested the following cycle:

 - 5 weeks of development
 - 2 weeks of beta phase
 - 1 week of release candidate phase
 - final release, and start again

At the start of the beta phase, we would have feature freeze (no more new 
features). At the start of the release candidate phase we would have a code 
freeze (only bug fixes) and branch the upcoming release so that trunk would be 
open for the next release. Bug fixes in the branch could then be merged back 
to trunk.

This actually gives developers 6 weeks worth of development time, gives us 
extra testing time, but still keeps our release cycle short.

After one or two release cycles like this, we can re-evaluate this methodology 
and decide how well it works.

What does everyone think about this? Any comments or suggestions?

-- 
Raoul Snyman, B.Tech IT (Software Engineering)
Saturn Laboratories
m: 082 550 3754
e: raoul.snyman at saturnlaboratories.co.za 
w: www.saturnlaboratories.co.za 
b: blog.saturnlaboratories.co.za