Re: [boost] [#1497] Ruling needed on tracker usage

Subject: Re: [boost] [#1497] Ruling needed on tracker usage
From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-06-03 11:56:17

on Fri May 29 2009, Beman Dawes <bdawes-AT-acm.org> wrote:

>> [the milestone list]
>> shows all the tickets that have been assigned to the 1.35.0 milestone.
>> Does this list have any meaning?
>
> It doesn't for me, and hasn't since we went to a schedule-driven
> release system a year and a half ago.
>
>>  In other words, are we actually
>> intending to address all of these problems for 1.35, and put off other
>> tickets for 1.35.1 or 1.36.0?
>>
>> IMO getting this list sorted out and handling the tickets one-by-one
>> is the most productive way to get us from here to a successful release
>> of 1.35.0.  That may mean a number of new tickets need to be added
>> (probably at least one for each major failure we're seeing in
>> http://engineering.meta-comm.com/boost-regression/1_34_1/developer/issues.html
>> and possibly others) and it will require part of the release team to
>> triage the whole list of tickets assigned to 1.35.0 and make some
>> decisions to put certain tickets off for later.
>
> In an organization with paid developers and paid managers, it might be
> possible to look at the tickets, look at the people and other
> resources available, assign milestone priorities accordingly, and then
> use progress on clearing them as a metric to guide release activities.
>
> But I'm at a loss for how we could use such milestones for Boost. So
> any ideas would be appreciated if folks think the milestones do have a
> place in Boost's process of getting releases out.

Milestones could be assigned by release managers and library maintainers
to critical steps that need to be handled for each release.  I believe
we're also going to need to have some actions such as "modularization"
that apply to Boost as a whole, and should be targeted at a particular
release.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com