The release-management tag has no wiki summary.
149
votes
31answers
21k views
Is it unusual for a small company (15 developers) not to use managed source/version control?
It's not really a technical question, but there are several other questions here about source control and best practice.
The company I work for (which will remain anonymous) uses a network share to ...
107
votes
21answers
4k views
Is there a way to combat Sales perpetually overcommitting?
I seem to be repeatedly stuck in a situation where release dates are set not based on anything technical, but because someone in Sales has committed to a customer by then. Based on discussions with ...
13
votes
8answers
386 views
How can I advocate a semi-strict release schedule in a risk-averse environment?
Recently I've been increasingly plagued by what I would have to describe as one of my most frustrating and morale-killing experiences in this profession: Having to sit on a release that has been ...
13
votes
5answers
721 views
What is a realistic way to handle customer-specific software patches?
I'm trying to gather effective ways that others have solved the following problem. At work we've been forced to release a software patch (to be installed on end-user systems) that we only want ...
11
votes
4answers
657 views
How do I avoid feature creep on a solo project?
So I have a program I'm worked on back in 2011 and all through 2012, but the last release was in December of 2011. I've been actively working on it, but feature creep lured its ugly head and now it is ...
10
votes
5answers
522 views
A simple ways to improve the release quality in RAD environment
A bit of a background here - we are a small team (of 5) of RAD developers responsible for internal software development in a big non-software company. "Internal software" varies from a desktop .NET ...
10
votes
10answers
2k views
How do you update live web sites with code changes?
I know this is a very basic question. If someone could humor me and tell me how they would handle this, I'd be greatful.
I decided to post this because I am about to install SynchToy to remedy the ...
8
votes
4answers
264 views
Shorter release cycle with DVCS
Does the choice of using a DVCS over a CVCS actually make for shorter release cycles? If so, what makes software release cycles shorter and what are the arguments for this?
Related to pull request? ...
8
votes
1answer
138 views
How to start a new major version of my application, but still keep the old version 'alive'
I have two applications, called A and B. The current version of these applciations are 7.x (some customers run 7.1, others run 7.2, ...). Both applications use a same common framework (let's call ...
7
votes
4answers
577 views
One-week release cycle: how do I make this feasible?
At my company (3-yr-old web industry startup), we have frequent problems with the product team saying "aaaah this is a crisis patch it now!" (doesn't everybody?)
This has an impact on the ...
7
votes
4answers
746 views
How do you put different versions of your library under version control? Do you use tags? Or branches? Or another method?
I have recently started putting my code under version control (in the lab I'm working, under SVN, and my own codes in github (obviously with git)). Before using version control, I used to do something ...
7
votes
1answer
347 views
Using Bit Torrent for internal release management
We currently abuse our version control system and use it... pretty much as an FTP to store big release binaries (4+ GB).
We are seeking to move away from this horrendous practice which has and ...
6
votes
3answers
260 views
How can rotating release managers improve a project's velocity and stability?
The Wikipedia article on Parrot VM includes this unreferenced claim:
Core committers take turns producing releases in a revolving schedule, where no single committer is responsible for multiple ...
6
votes
2answers
659 views
How should we draw the release burndown chart?
I have been in various Agile projects and seen many release burndown chart style mostly manual since somehow all the tools that I have run across does not produce really useful burndown chart.
In ...
6
votes
3answers
267 views
What is Mozilla's new release management strategy?
I saw today that FireFox released a new version (5). I tried reading about what was added and ran into this link: ...
6
votes
3answers
307 views
Mercurial release management. Rejecting changes that fail testing
Researching distributed source control management (specifically mercurial).
My question is more or less what is the best practice for rejecting entire sets of code that fail testing?
Example:
A team ...
6
votes
5answers
333 views
Should the build drive your tags or should the tags drive the build?
Our current method of creating a product release is to tag all of our component repositories with the next appropriate version and then modify a master build script with these new version numbers for ...
6
votes
1answer
210 views
What's the best way to acknowledge many FOSS sources in a single project?
I have a project which uses a large number of LGPL, Artistic and other open-source licensed libraries. What's the canonical (i.e. the "standard") way of acknowledging multiple sources in a single ...
5
votes
7answers
514 views
How should semi-agile team operate during management-imposed waterfall-like “testing phase”
I'm not looking for advice how agile process should work. I know that part. I'm curious what the best way to adapt the process to a typical large, well-established corporation who loves its ...
5
votes
3answers
470 views
What is your strategy for converting RC builds into retail?
We're trying to implement a strategy for how we transition our builds from RC to released retail code.
When we label a build as a release candidate, we send it to QA for regression. If they approve ...
5
votes
3answers
229 views
Infamous failure due to the lack of release process?
With my fellow engineers we are putting in place a release process in a team that formerly was made only of biologists. I am going to make a presentation to explain the process to them and explain ...
4
votes
5answers
1k views
How do you keep released binaries under version control?
How do you keep released binaries under version control?
This allows to track which stuffs are changed between each release.
I mean to separate the released binaries from source repository.
The ...
4
votes
7answers
1k views
How often to release in Scrum sprint
How often to you release during a sprint. Only at the end of the sprint or every time a feature is ready. And how to you handle bugfix releases?
4
votes
5answers
2k views
Choosing the right branching strategy for releases
Starting with a new dev team on a new project and we have to define our Branching strategy for our source repository (e.g. Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010). We've run into a sticky discussion ...
4
votes
2answers
143 views
How to manage releases with multiple features at different states?
We have a branching structure of:
multiple dev branches for each major new feature
Main branch, merged into from a dev branch once a feature is ready for testing
Release branch, merged into from ...
4
votes
1answer
197 views
Benefits of rapid release development cycle adopted by the Mozilla Foundation
Which the real benefits of rapid release development cycle adopted by the Mozilla Foundation in comparison with the strategy adopted previously?
4
votes
2answers
158 views
What is a good Planned Release/Freeze/Beta Methodology?
I've been working on a nightmare of a project for some months now. The product is a small Ruby on Rails app/website for internal use by a small group of people. I'm coming up to the finish line and ...
3
votes
4answers
605 views
How to act when you get the last warning? [closed]
I'm a software developer, currently working on web development.
We are a small company a team with 2 persons, a developer and a designer and we have no-one to test our applications.
From the last ...
3
votes
3answers
246 views
Release Planning in Agile/Extreme Programming
I've been studying couple of books of how to exactly implement agile. I am confused about release planning.
Our application is a Insurance System consisting of different modules (Quoting, Policy ...
3
votes
4answers
153 views
Delivery terminology and order of magnitude
What is the standard way of describing how software products are released and the proportionate order of magnitude to which the changes relative to the software product are conveyed?
Is
Release
...
3
votes
4answers
356 views
How do I create a potential shippable product (PSP) at the end of a sprint?
I'm running a team of 4 developers and 2 testers and trying to abide by the Scrum principle of creating a PSP with every sprint. That means I need to create a potential release with all the user ...
3
votes
4answers
479 views
Release Management versions control?
We recently experienced a deployment issue where it turned out that the version objects were not in sync in one of the environments.
We have a large database group and different teams have different ...
3
votes
4answers
283 views
Should developers do their own software releases (if there is a prod support team in place)?
I know there are going to always be differences depending on the particular size, staff etc, but i wanted to get feedback in general around:
In an environment where you have a production support team ...
2
votes
3answers
302 views
Does open sourcing your work help you?
Are developers actually likely to receive significant help by open sourcing a work in its unfinished stages, or are open source consumers more likely to want something ready to use?
This is ...
2
votes
4answers
175 views
Must all new features go through betatest?
Obviously, small usability fixes and bugfixes go directly into the stable product. What about small new features? Can you afford to just release them after internal testing, or do they have to be ...
2
votes
3answers
255 views
Release Management Tools with DVCS (Mercurial)
My development team is migrating from SVN to Mercurial. Having researched DVCS best practices, it has been suggested that we develop against feature branches of the repo mainline, test them ...
2
votes
1answer
152 views
Which tool to use for creating application releases?
I'm wondering what others use as a tool for creating the final package to hand over to the customer. For now, these are the tasks it should perform for our company:
build a set of VS projects ...
2
votes
2answers
194 views
Branching and CI Builds with Agile
We follow many agile processes, including automated tests, continuous integration, sprint reviews, etc... We're currently having a debate about how often we should branch release builds.
We've been ...
2
votes
2answers
668 views
Development environment to manage multiple Oracle databases
I am in an enterprise environment where we have applications that need to run against multiple Oracle databases. Developers may need to manage multiple vintages of these databases to support ...
2
votes
1answer
68 views
centralized hosted application framework or “private copies” for each program?
We have a centralised business application framework, and it contains all our business logic and provides access to all our back-end systems. It is accessed by a number of different programs and ...
2
votes
3answers
143 views
How do I know if a particular build has a particular version control change in it?
Let's say I have a build. I need to know if a particular changelist/commit is present in that build.
How would I solve this problem?
I can think of a couple of possible approaches:
1) Add the ...
2
votes
2answers
269 views
What is your typical software release deployment regimen?
We have an ASP.NET app that exists in three environments: Dev where we do our actual work, production where we deploy our final releases at the end of the month, and staging where we deploy our ...
2
votes
1answer
166 views
Complex Release Vehicle Management
I'm looking into improving our build and release system. We are a .Net/Windows shop, and I don't see any really good tools for Windows for generating the files that are to be dropped in patch or ...
1
vote
1answer
174 views
When to distinguish OS versions in canonical names for target platforms
I would like to organize my company's software releases by platform. I've looked at how Mozilla, Perforce, and Apache organize their releases, and it seems that I should partition by OS and processor ...
1
vote
3answers
225 views
Best practices for launching a new software version
I rebuilt a web app to replace a version that we have been using for the last 3-4 years. We have a few thousand clients and a few hundred active users per day. The functionality is basically the same. ...
1
vote
2answers
106 views
Separating Data and Implementation
I'm working on a project that has frequent changes on the database and the implementation layers. I was releasing both the code and the database under the same release version, but since the database ...
1
vote
2answers
73 views
Looking for good practices on managing branches and developers in Git
I a little while ago I joined a new development team and recently we had our first major release. We've used Git since the beginning of the project and by now are somewhat comfortable with it. ...
0
votes
5answers
173 views
How detailed should public release notes be?
When releasing a software update, how detailed should the notes be? Specifically, how detailed should bug fixes be?
0
votes
1answer
57 views
Semantic versioning for desktop applications
I can easily follow the Semantic Versioning recommendations if I develop a library or API, but what if the developed product is a website or a desktop application?
When would you increment a major ...
0
votes
2answers
89 views
Proper name for a project supports 2 different release
Is there a technical name for a software project where the current and prior stable releases are both maintained?
