[Dev] Phases and 0.7 milestone schedule

[Katie Capps Parlante]

Sheila and Mimi put together proposals that identify "phases" for each 
0.7 tenet. Each phase is a somewhat coherent set of features that are 
testable, and that an end user could experiment with.

http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-February/004105.html
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-February/004108.html

They've also identified priorities for calendar improvements, a proposal 
for which work gets done first:
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-February/004065.html

Heikki, Lisa, Alec and others have been arguing strongly for shorter 
releases, and I think there is general agreement that we'd like to have 
something stable that a user could play with before we finish the whole 
scope of 0.7 work we have in front of us.

Putting this together, I'd like to propose that we have longer, more 
stable milestones during the 0.7 timeframe, and that we think about each 
milestone as a mini-release (alpha release, if you will). Strawman proposal:

+ Milestones are ~2 months apart, and feature driven.

+ Each phase proposed by Sheila and Mimi falls into a milestone. (We 
could make adjustments once we scope out the work -- one phase could 
take two milestones if it had to or we could do two phases in one 
milestone if they fit).

+ We spend more time testing and stabilizing each milestone.

+ We provide a path to migrate data from milestone to milestone.

+ The expectation is that dogfood users could download the milestone and 
use it.

+ We could use the term "alpha" instead of "milestone" (a nod to 
previous discussions about milestone release numbering).

Thoughts?

We still need to do more work on bottom up planning to put real dates on 
this and see if it works out, but if we have agreement on the general 
idea it will provide a structure for the bottom up planning.

Cheers,
Katie