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Marty Kagan
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For my first Jive Talks post, I'd like to talk about some of the changes we're making to the release train in 2008: Internally, we are committed to continuing with an agile development process based on 3 week iterations. At the end of each of these cycles, we will make the current code available as an alpha or beta beta release for developers. Information about how to sign up for the 2.0 Beta Program should be available soon! Externally, we are aiming to launch major/minor releases once a quarter. Clearspace 2.0 has been (and continues to be) an ambitious undertaking, but we're still shooting for a release in early April. Subsequent releases (2.1, 2.2, 2.3) should land in July, October, January, etc. We're looking at adding some very exciting features this year, but I'll let others tell that story...

 

On the support side, we will continue to provide patch releases for up to 12 months after any major or minor release. These point releases (2.0.1, 2.0.2, etc.) will be reserved strictly for bug fixes, and contain no new functionality.  As in the past, these will be released on a 3-week cycle to give the Software Quality Assurance team sufficient time for testing. We've planned for 3-4 scheduled patch releases after every major/minor release.  After that, we will do patches on an ad hoc basis to address any severity 1 or 2 issues that may arise.

 

The 1.x series went into maintenance mode starting with 1.10. There is a 1.10.1 patch release scheduled for next week, and again, we will continue to do patches on an as-needed basis to address critical issues for up to 12 months, after which we will ask customers to upgrade to 2.x, in order to stay on a supported release.

 

On a personal note, I've been having a great time since joining the Jive development team in November. As you may know, we're doing a lot of hiring this year, and I would love to hear from you if you're interested in joining us!

2,622 Views Tags: clearspace, release, release_train, agile


Comments (3)
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Jan 21, 2008 2:06 PM Guest Phil  says:

"There is a 1.10.1 patch release scheduled for next week"

 

WHAT?  I can't possibly wait that long.
Jan 22, 2008 1:21 PM Guest Marc Vermeulen  says:

Marty,

 

In what area's of your agile process are you using ClearSpace as management tool ?

 

How do you manage your backlog and user stories in combination with ClearSpace.  ClearSpace is not suited to easily manage backlog lists, so we manage our backlog in Excel.  On the other hand, user story descriptions are good candidates to be included on the wiki.  Also sprint goals and release goals can easily be published on the wiki.

 

We mainly struggle with the problem that the backlog Excel sheet is still file based and there is no possibility to add a file link on the wiki.  You can upload the Excel sheet as a file, but since the file is changed multiple times a day, this is not workable.

 

... your opinion on using ClearSpace as tool to support the agile process is more than welcome ...

 

Regards

 

Marc
Jan 28, 2008 1:27 AM Bill Lynch Bill Lynch    says in response to Marc Vermeulen:

Marc,

 

You're right -- right now, CS isn't suited best to manage a list of items with arbitrary attributes for sorting and filtering. We use a different tool for that but keep most of what we'd consider to be a PRD inside of Clearspace. Our notion of a PRD is pretty different than most -- it's basically something that gives more definition to a feature or improvement over time. Everyone from PM to dev pitches in to refine it along the way.

 

I'd suggest using another tool to organize a lot of the raw data about your backlog, etc. Use Clearspace as a way to coordinate and collaborate with multiple teams to add more definition. You can also get your teams to start blogging their status or update a doc with status. In 2.0 (coming out soon) you'll be able to use a new structure to better coordinate this work.

 

Of course this doesn't rule out better support for this in the future. We're always looking for a better way to do something via Clearspace and would love to hear any ideas you have. Feel free to ping us directly on this if you like.

 

Cheers,

--Bill
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