The days of a long release cycle are gone.
A year ago, we’d plan this big feature for BigBlueButton, estimate that it would take two months, then end up finishing in four months (twice as long). And while the feature was good, we felt we had somehow missed the mark.During the past six months, we’ve released a new version almost every month. This is due to our adopting a more agile development process: two week sprints, daily stand ups, and putting everything in an issue tracking system. The funny part is, we initially wanted to release every two weeks, but we ended up releasing every four weeks (again, twice as long!).
That’s OK. In looking closer at our release cycle, our extra effort is a mixture of (a) testing, (b) working on customer-oriented projects for integration of BigBlueButton (which tends to accelerate other features, which is good), and constant refactoring of existing code. All good stuff for a healthy open source project. So, externally, you’ll see we now release every month, but internally we are trying to keep our efforts to two week iterations to account for the above.
If you want to see what’s planned for our upcoming iteration for this month (October), check the issues tagged for BigBluebutton 0.62 release
