[bind10-dev] hardening sprint thoughts

[Stephen Morris]

On 14/03/2012 09:55, Jelte Jansen wrote:
> There are of course a number of conflicting visions on whether to
> do hardening sprints; some people think they are essential to the 
> process, others think they are a clear sign the process is broken
> ('if you need a hardening sprint, your definition of done is
> wrong').

Theoretically that is probably the correct view.  In practice, where
you have real deadlines, hardening sprints are needed.

> In my idea, this would consist of smaller tasks that got left out, 
> annoyances that you've been wanting to address, and filled up with 
> defects. I would not like to see it become purely leftover work
> from the previous sprint, but if anything falls through, this is
> where it would go. And we'd fill the rest up with defect tickets.
> It would also be the place to allocate some time for more
> 'real-use' testing, and find things that are not yet caught by our
> unit and system tests; We kind of did this before the last snapshot
> release, and we did find things, so I'd like to actually allocate
> some time for it.

Just an aside, I counted 174 "TODO" comments in the .h, .cc, .sh and
.py files.  (As well as 38 "XXX" comments.) I would argue that
fully-hardened code should not have any TODO or XXX comments in it and
I doube that these all have associated tickets.

> 
> So for 'normal' sprints; we'd have one or more 'feature' goals,
> which usually consist of a set of related tickets, and make up the
> majority of the time for the sprint. This is then complemented with
> the usual 5+ defects, and we can still propose and champion any
> other ticket to be included (just like we do now). And for
> 'release' or 'hardening' sprints, we do not 'preselect' anything
> based on features (unless leftover), but expand the defects and
> 'any' to be the whole sprint.

Agreed.

On 14/03/2012 10:40, Jelte Jansen wrote:
> What I think best encapsulates what I have in mind is the last
> train idea; I do not know the english term for it, but in Dutch
> the 'bezemtrein', literally 'broom train', is the last train on a
> line at night. This train stops at every station, so it can pick up
> any traveller that got out of the pub too late to catch their
> originally planned train

No special name for it.  But until about the 1950s or so, tardy
travellers who missed their last train could always sit on the
platform until the early hours of the morning when there might be a
milk train they could catch.  Now they would just have to sit there
all night - such is progress.

Stephen