[Cosmo-dev] Cosmo release frequency

[Aparna Kadakia]

Chiming in to bring in the QA perspective on both week v/s month long  
release cycles.

While I am in favor of weekly releases, it does put certain strain on  
the under-staffed QA team to qualify releases in matter of days. It  
does set a limit to how much can be tested in the limited time we  
have. We have an outstanding example just from last friday where we  
almost missed a rather critical regression because we don't have an  
automated test for such scenarios and even worse, don't have time to  
write more tests. And there is only so much manual testing that can  
happen in such shorter release cycles.
Monthly cycles would give us slightly more room to do more exhaustive  
testing and test development.

So if we do go ahead with the weekly releases, the usual caveat does  
hold, that is once in a while we might have to live with bugs and  
regressions in the release. This might necessitate rolling out  
patches on Hub, if critical.



On Oct 8, 2007, at 2:33 PM, Ted Leung wrote:

> Here are some of my concerns with a 4 week long release cycle:
>
> 1. "Themed" releases are not a goal.  This is just another name for  
> feature-oriented releases, which is something that we are no longer  
> going to do.
>
> 2. Four weeks is a long time to wait for UI features to show up on  
> the Hub.  Also, it is a long time to wait for bug fixes to show up  
> on the hub.  If we ended up with 4 weeks between feature releases,  
> then we would probably end up having to do bug fix releases in  
> between.
>
> 3. We are still at an early stage of web UI/hub usage.  Getting  
> features out to people and incorporating their feedback in a timely  
> way is important for our goal of being able to improve the  
> experience for our users.  Inability to deliver features quickly is  
> also slowing down our ability to get the word out about Chandler:  
> <http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-users/2007- 
> October/000660.html>.
>
> 4. I'm not sure I understand the stress level argument.   With the  
> time based releases, we are not asking people to promise to deliver  
> a feature by a specific release.   When the feature is done and  
> suitably tested, it goes in the next release - we neither push  
> forward or push back release dates based on the completeness of  
> features.
>
> Ted
>
>
> On Oct 8, 2007, at 10:51 AM, Brian Moseley wrote:
>
>> On 10/8/07, Ted Leung <twl at osafoundation.org> wrote:
>>
>>> For Cosmo 0.7.x, we were on a 1 week release cycle, and for Cosmo
>>> 0.8, we stretched a little bit in order to get the CalDAV interop
>>> work in.   I'd like to go back to a time based release schedule, but
>>> I'd like to have people's opinions as to how frequently we ought to
>>> release.   My personal preference would be every 2 weeks, but I 'd
>>> like to hear what other people think.
>>
>> i think two weeks is a little too ambitious. releases would lose any
>> sort of coherence and would just be dumping grounds for random
>> assortments of independent features. i think a month might allow  
>> us to
>> declare a theme for a release and therefore rally around it a little
>> more. it would also keep stress levels a little more evened out.
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