By Michael Boldiston
One of the things that are always a challenge in a software development company such as Inlogik is balancing development to meet immediate client requests with the need to have a structured release process. It is a tricky thing to get right, and one area where we have by our own admission been less than formally structured in the past.
Moving into 2011 we are putting in place a new release plan which we hope will achieve better balance and a more reliable structure to ProMaster releases.
Every two months, commencing in February 2011, there will be a service pack collated, tested and made available to clients. These service packs will contain all development, (both client and our own), for the preceding two months. So any time a work order is raised and accepted by a given client, it will by default, be available as part of the next service pack release. This will remove the situation we have had with (for example) v8.0, which had a huge amount of development that went into the version, but additionally had over 50 individual patches created and tested independently for client deliverables.
That is not to say that we will never allow development between releases, but it will always involve more work and cost to do so with Inlogik having to test the work twice - once in the patch and once in the following release.
We will also need to be firm on the deadlines for requests to be included in each of these releases given they will be much smaller. Below is a list of the 'cut-off' dates for each release, if a given work order is signed prior to one these dates it will make it into the release, otherwise it will go into the next one. The caveat on this statement is that we will still need to negotiate delivery timeframes for large work orders (more than 5 days work).
Please feel free to chat with your account manager about the new release strategy; we believe it is a step in the right direction.
2011 Service Pack Releases & Work Order Deadlines
- ProMaster v8.1, early-February 2011 Release
- Deadline for WO inclusion, Friday 24th December 2010
- ProMaster v8.2, late-March 2011 Release
- Deadline for WO inclusion, Friday 18th February 2011
- ProMaster v8.3, late-May 2011 Release
- Deadline for WO inclusion, Friday 15th April 2011
- ProMaster v8.4, late-July 2011 Release
- Deadline for WO inclusion, Friday 17th June 2011
- ProMaster v8.5, late-Sept 2011 Release
- Deadline for WO inclusion, Friday 19th August 2011
- ProMaster v8.6, late-Nov 2011 Release
- Deadline for WO inclusion, Friday 21st October 2011