I read this interesting blog post: https://about.gitlab.com/2015/12/17/gitlab-release-process/ It describes how the Gitlab team manage to do a release every month on the 22nd.
It also says this is good for motivation of the team, because features that have been developed actually make it to the user, and the team does not need to wait for one difficult feature to be finished until the release can happen. Things that are not finished, get delayed to the next release.
It is also a good indicator for users, that they can expect a new version at a fixed date. This increases reliability and trust.
I am wondering if we are already doing something similar? At least quarterly: there has been a release in March 2015 (2015.03), and I did an internal release 2015.06, though there was no public release. There was a 2015.09 release to the public.
I am working on a 2015.12 release right now.
One thing that currently increases complexity is the merge of the public functionality from the ICT fork into the Open Source fork of OpenPetra. Doing that merge once a quarter means quite a lot of work, which requires high concentration, because I don't want code that is not intended for the public to go into the Open Source version. Also resolving the merge conflicts is not a trivial job. It would actually be good to do this on a more regular basis, rather than only every 3 months.
Currently, I only increase the version number with the month, if I did a new merge from the ICT branch. So the release this week will still be called 2015.09, because it does not include the work from the guys at ICT of the past 3 months. I will be increasing the release number only, so it will be 2015.09.4
Once I get everything merged up until December 2015, then I will release 2015.12.
I don't know if that will still happen in December, but I will be aiming for early January.
Last week, the ICT OpenPetra was actually implemented in one OM office, which is a huge step forward! Congratulations to the team, and thanks to God for His help in this huge project!
The ICT OpenPetra will only get bugfixes in the next months, and some features required by specific offices, so that the migration of further offices will go smoothly. This means we can continue the Beta phase of OpenPetra for the time being.
