[Opensource] release management process being revised

[Sandra Cann]

I wanted to post about our release management process which is
undergoing revision. 

http://www.jcorporate.com/html/customers/developers/releasemgmt.html

What happens when a project gets very successful the ground rules for
release management become that much more important. As I have learned it
becomes much harder than internal development projects because you don't
always know what contributions are coming. With a successful open source
project like Expresso, there gets to be MANY code checkins by the
various committers.  This is a GREAT thing but introduces new challenges
to managing open source.

You might remember when we completed 5.05 we had a long discussion on
release management and what we could do to better "release early,
release often." On the positive side we have released early and often a
lot more, but not more often for final releases. Having identified this,
we looked at what we might do.

With the release of 5.05 we came up with a plan to close releases to new
features and non-essential code changes. With various release
candidates, several times we have been "this close" to releasing a
final. A few bugs would get corrected, and we'd start testing. Voila
more code changed and more testing. The problem is no one really wanted
to close the release to code contributions during the process. And with
each code modification we were back to starting the testing process. A
never ending scenario. 

Our core contributor team recently took a hard look at this and came up
with a solution we think that really gets to the heart of the matter to
enable final releases more oftem, while not preventing folks from
continuing to check in their contributions into CVS HEAD. It will also
give our production Expresso users, new versions on a more regular
basis. 

We'd like to ask you to review this document, and solicit your input. 

http://www.jcorporate.com/html/customers/developers/releasemgmt.html

We look forward to your comments.

Cheers
Sandra