33: Just Ship

Episode Links

Feedback

• New Coder wants to when he is considered to “know” a language.

• Luke asks:

“How is it you come to figure out the right tools (languages) for the rightob, and once you do that, what’s the anticipated ‘study time’ that needs to go into learning to use the language well enough to feel like you can actually do what you’ve set out to do?”

• Eric shares a development contest

• Hayden wants to know what I think of JavaFX

• mdominick.com – Give Duke a Break

Brian’s War Story

Hello Michael and Chris,

I work in a medium sized development shop with about 20 developers working on what’s essentially an enterprise client side app. I have always considered our process for releasing bug fix updates as being rather backwards and poorly executed. Essentially our head of “QA” will send an e-mail one morning to all developers that the code is “frozen”.

He will then do a build, test it for 4 or 5 days and then send an e-mail to everyone that the code is “unfrozen”. During this “frozen” time the developers are still expected to continue fixing bugs but rather than check in their changes they are supposed to “sit” on them, usually for several days, until the “unfrozen” e-mail is sent out. At this point a free-for-all of code check in commences with all sorts of conflict and collision shenanigans.

That said, there is nothing physically restricting the checking in of code. If a developer doesn’t see the “fr eeze” e-mail or simply forgets after a few days then “QA” unleashes their wrath on the poor sod. I’m sure you can see all sorts of problems with this joke of a build/test/release process and I am even a little embarrassed just describing it. I would like to offer some suggestions to my superiors about ways to improve this and was wondering if you guys had any thoughts or suggestions.

One, perhaps obvious idea would be to switch to using Git as we are still using the ancient CVS for source control. However I’m still very much a novice and trying to learn it better in my spare time. How would you suggest to use Git in a way that we can improve our build/test/release cycle? Do you have any other thoughts or suggestions to bring our release cycle up to a more sane and reasonable, not to mention modern process?

Thanks for your thoughts and thank you for the awesome show you do each week.

Sincerely, Brian M.

Launch!

• How do you know when your project is ready to launch?

• Is this really a bug?

  • Bug? or new feature?

• Do I have to be 100% bug free to ship?

  • Is that even possible

• What market?