[Cosmo-dev] Cosmo release frequency

[Katie Capps Parlante]

Wearing my PM hat, I'd prefer shorter-than-a-month cycles, mostly for 
reasons Jared and Ted have listed already.

- Shorter cycles allow us to react more quickly to problems that block 
adoption. As Ted points out, we're more likely to have to squeeze in an 
emergency release if we go with longer cycles. This also applies to 
problems/fixes that aren't critical bug fixes, but will help the next 
set of users adopt it enthusiastically.

- We're moving away from themed releases and towards a prioritized work 
list. Perhaps one of the concerns is feeling like each small release is 
a random jumble. We can still have "tenets" or goals we are moving 
towards in the prioritized work list -- I'd just like to be flexible 
about how they land in releases, and get releases out on a quick schedule.

Mimi did mention one concern with shorter releases: sometimes it is 
better that a new feature (or set of features) land together and not 
piecemeal -- otherwise the app feels broken. If we do have feature work 
that looks like this, I'm assuming we'd handle it by doing the work on a 
branch so that it lands in one piece. It should be ok for some of these 
branches to be worked on over the span of more than one release.

That said, I could certainly live with month long cycles. If we feel 
like the process breaks for QA, or if developers feel it causes them to 
be particularly inefficient, PPD can certainly work with either cycle 
length. Over the medium term (next few months) we'd like to see some 
good momentum on Hub and Server, and I think we can do that with either 
cycle length.

Ted's the owner/driver, btw (making clear as per governance principles).

Cheers,
Katie

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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