Releasing Alphas and Betas without "freezing"

[Robbie Williamson]

On 06/15/2012 10:26 AM, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> Le 15/06/2012 17:05, Scott Kitterman a écrit :
>> I don't think you get to have it both ways.  Either we stabilize an
>> image and
>> put a stamp on it and we need some kind of freeze or we don't.  Trying
>> to let
>> developers continue to do their work while ignoring the milestone just
>> pushes
>> the problem of getting things fixed for the milestone on the release
>> team.
> Hey,
> 
> Yeah, you are right there, so if we get working dailies every day do we
> still need alphas at all?
> 
> Ideally we would have the automatic testing flagging isos "green" when
> they have no issue (with the goal to always have them good) and we would
> recommend people to just pick the current green iso.
> 
> Can we just drop the image rolling part of milestones? We still probably
> want fixed checkpoints in the cycle to review the features, etc but they
> don't especially need to be linked with a special image...
> 

With our dailies, I've found that the milestones are most useful for
planning bug fix landings and feature deliverables. I'd be +1 on
dropping alphas all together.  If we need some specific test feedback on
a given image, we can always issue calls for testing like we've done in
the past.  However, if we drop alphas, I think we might want to keep a
single beta and consider an earlier RC in place of the Beta 2.  These
releases are typically aimed at getting the less developer savy/bug
tolerant users to test and provide feedback, so I could see perhaps a
more strenuous QA process put in place for them, i.e. for system
integrated/stress testing, versus the typical Unit/Functional automated
testing we have reporting to jenkins.  It would also be good for the
release team to have a couple practice runs before the real deal ;).

Just my $0.02

-Robbie

-- 
Robbie Williamson <robbie at ubuntu.com>
robbiew[irc.freenode.net]

"Don't make me angry...you wouldn't like me when I'm angry."
 -Bruce Banner