Season’s Greetings, Lucites! On behalf of eveyone at LAS, here’s hoping you’re all having a great holiday season! Hopefully Lucee has been more nice than naughty for you this year, but whatever the case, we’re ever-focused on sprinting towards better and better releases. On that note, today we’ve got some announcements to make.
First, as you’ve probably noticed, this has been an especially long Release Candidate period since we shipped 5.3.4.54 (RC). This was due in part to typical annual demands of the CFCamp conference in Germany, for which we spent some significant time working on the roadmap for the next major and minor versions of Lucee, creating some test builds for demo purposes, etc. But more importantly, it’s also due to an uptick in regressions over the past two releases (5.3.3.62 (final) 5.3.4.54 (RC)). We spent a lot more time than anticipated working with ticket reporters, identifying regression sources, and of course discussing/debating then implementing and testing fixes. We identified 14 tickets that needed urgent attention, and about half of the problems discovered during the RC period were in 5.3.4.54 (roughly the other half were in 5.3.3.62), and since that’s too high a number of regressions in our opinion, we’ve accordingly decided to build a second 5.3.4 Release Candidate (5.3.4.73), which is available today. We plan to make this a final build over the next couple of weeks, so since this will be a much shorter RC period than is typical, please help with testing RC2 today, in particular if you’ve been active in any of the tickets covered. Here’s the 5.3.4.73 (RC2) list:
Next, if a ticket you’ve been following isn’t covered in this new RC, then good news–we’re also announcing the final 2019 sprint, which officially starts today. This sprint will overlap from December to January, and will produce a 5.3.5 Release Candidate. Here’s a look at the list of tickets selected for this sprint. Please note that this list may shrink in size as the sprint unfolds into January. This relates to a new sprint strategy we’re experimenting with for 2020. Read on below.
Finally, a quick note about the 2020 development schedule. As readers of this august publication know, I was pretty vocal throughout the year about the increasing number of regressions we’ve been seeing, increasingly difficult sprint planning, and related complaints. The cause of all of this is clear, and even expected–the demands on the development team have been steadily increasing, both in volume and complexity. This is good news, really, as it means Lucee adoption is increasing, and the use cases for Lucee are increasingly complex. Exactly what we want for a development platform! However, it also means that, while we scale up the development team to handle the increased load, we’ve got to get smarter about how we manage things in the meantime. So, for 2020, we’re going to be doing a larger number of shorter sprints. We’re thinking something along the lines of targeted, 2-week sprints, which will allow us to iterate more rapidly, but while limiting regressions and maintaining a high build quality.
After the December-January sprint is done, we’ll share detailed info about the 2020 development schedule. Meantime, happy coding, Happy Holidays, and thanks for listening!
Best,
Patrick
Lucee!