[Board-public] Re: [Framework-Team] Re: release schedule changes

[Alexander Limi]

On 12/29/06, Wichert Akkerman <wichert at wiggy.net> wrote:
> Talking with limi he appears to be in favour of the second option: he
> considers it critical that 3.0 has a very polished modern UI. Personally
> I have a slight preference for the first option: we have landed an
> awesome amount of changes and can still keep a healthy release schedule.

I'm in favor of fixing the UI, ideally we should of course get this in
before the beta goes out, but if the UI isn't ready, the release isn't
ready, IMO. This is very much about perception, people *expect*
user-visible changes in a x.0 release, not in a x.5 release. Plone 2.5
had pretty much no UI improvements, and people are expecting 3.0 to
deliver that.

That being said, I think we're definitely progressing at a good rate,
I guess it depends on how you define "beta". Releasing a beta with the
current KSS UI and not change it at all before the release would be
disastrous. I think we have agreed on most of the UI fixes that need
to be done, and I'll see if I can make a more detailed list that we
can work off sometime this week or next week.

Ironically, the biggest unknown area is an infrastructural one: the
new workflow improvements and changes. The UI has been checked in for
this, but it needs tests, wiring up the UI and general user testing
and tinkering. Everything else that needs to be done on the UI side is
what I consider incremental improvements — but depending on how you
look at UI, that may not match others expectations.

Personally, I never liked the separation of infrastructure/UI-focused
releases, and it was also something that was never voted on or
accepted as the way to go — it was just suggested. But if there is an
alternating schedule, 3.0 is definitely the UI release, not the
infrastructure release. ;)

> I am thinking we need to be stricter about the alternating
> infrastructure and UI releases in the future: currently we are still
> doing both infrastructure and UI in a single release.

I don't think this will realistically ever happen if we're supposed to
have releases every 6 months. You can't add infrastructure like
versioning and ignore the UI aspect.

That being said, I haven't done my job in making the UI tasks clear to
the team, nor have I delivered what I hoped in terms of actual work.
Things have settled down now that I have finally started at Google, so
I suspect I will be more productive in the near future. I'm still a
bottleneck on the UI side, something I'm working on resolving (and the
UI sprint we have planned is a big part of that effort).

— Alexander Limi — http://limi.net —