Re: Release Cycle
On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 6:24 PM, Barclay, Daniel <daniel@fgm.com> wrote:
> David Jardine wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 12:28:44PM -0800, Ken Teague wrote:
>>> Barclay, Daniel wrote:
> ...
>>
>> Well, maybe I'll prove to be understanding neither of you, but the
>> point seems to be that you can't 'force' the maturity of a package.
>
> I wasn't talking about trying to force the maturation of any changes to go
> faster; I just meant dividing the changes into two (or however many) groups
> so the first group could be implemented, "matured" and released before the
> second group got started.
>
> That shouldn't increase the _explicit_ development, testing, and fixing
> effort required. (Of course, as I said, there is also the additional
> (presumably significant) overhead of making and tracking an additional
> release in the middle.)
>
> On the other hand, that division admittedly does reduce the _time_ during
> which a change group is implicitly tested by being used. (Instead of
> having both sets of changes being tested for duration D, each gets tested
> for only duration D/2).
>
> So I guess that question is how significant that testing duration is
> (compared to the number of people implicitly testing, etc.).
>
>
>
>> Halving the seed rate in a field of wheat won't make the wheat ripen
>> twice as fast.
>
> But breaking an ice cube in half does help it melt faster.
>
> The question is which analogy is actually ... um ... analogous (or,
> probably more accurately, how much each applies to this case).
>
>
It sounds like what you are advocating is for the freeze to begin, say,
six months after release. Is that correct? So the question really would
be: what's the shortest amount of time from release N to freeze for N+1
that can be justified given the overhead of releasing, and I think the
answer to that will always be at least somewhat subjective.
Nye
(PS: FWIW, it's my *personal* belief that the freeze for Lenny should
have been somewhat earlier, but on the other hand we already seem to
have reached the point where the time from freeze to release is a
large fraction of the total release cycle, and do we really want that
proportion to be bigger?)
Reply to: