One-week release cycle: how do I make this feasible?
- by Arkaaito
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 productivity (and morale) of engineering staff, self included. Management has spent some time thinking about how to reduce the frequency of these same-day requests and has come up with the solution that we are going to have a release every week. (Previously we'd been doing one every two weeks, which usually slipped by a couple of days or so.)
There are 13 developers and 6 local / 9 offshore testers; the theory is that only 4 developers (and all testers) will work on even-numbered releases, unless a piece of work comes up that really requires some specific expertise from one of the other devs. Each cycle will contain two days of dev work and two days of QA work (plus 1 day of scoping / triage / ...).
My questions are:
(a) Does anyone have experience with this length of release cycle?
(b) Has anyone heard of this length of release cycle even being attempted?
(c) If (a) or (b), how on Earth do you make it work? (Any pitfalls to avoid, etc., are also appreciated.)
(d) How can we minimize the damage if this effort fails?
