Xen and the art of software release management

First - welcome to Brandon. Since he ran like a rat from the ship it will be a pleasure to collaborate with him on something. Even if I have to beat him. Whatever this CatSpit thing is or turns into..

Second. Let me tell you how fucking stupid people are. You might need to understand a little bit about how software is made to really appreciate my frustration here. Given that I've been working for this company for around 7 years, you'd think I'd have the hang of it by now and not get pissed off with all the same shit which repeats cycle on cycle? Hell no, sister. People never cease to amaze me.

OK, so a little project management for those of you who don't know. There's a 3-way tradeoff, right? You have resources, you have software quality, and you have the schedule. If you need to aggressively push 1 of them and the other two are fixed then something generally gives. If you need to shorten the delivery cycle, you generally are gonna need more resources, right? If you want a better release, you're gonna need more time to test, capiche?

Take a practical example, oh, say from hypothetical recent experience. We need to ship this software first week of April. The quality's shit - we slip the release. We set a new target date, ramp up the testing and find all of these stability / memory issues. Typically these issues take a long time to resolve. Nobody wants to acknowledge this so the date stays the same while we 'work extra hard' to try and hit it. We patch builds, run tests, run tests on top of those tests, run weekends, run nights to try and isolate them. Whatever you do, it's always the same end result - 1 week of hell where the developers check in anything they can to try and patch these issues. You think you have the final build, run the final tests and... What the fuck happened? All tests are failing, memory is off the chart, the server's crashing, we're hitting breakpoints in the code..

This, my friends, is known as shovelling code over the fence, and it ain't pretty. My peeve isn't so much with that as with the fact that you're in the last week of release right? You've been broadcasting the date for the final build for about a month now and everyone knows about it. You make the build. You freeze the code and lock it down so that you prevent any more checkins. Once the build is made and the date is past, I guarantee, I fucking guaranteethat the release manager will get 5-10 requests for new check-ins from pissant whiney little developers who hadn't paid attention. Typical excuses you will hear:

• "But this is really important, we have to have it for this release"


• "I wasn't aware we were making the final build today"


• "I've just been on holiday for 5 months in the Bahamas and came back this week"


• "My customer reported this issue 3 weeks after code freeze, can we fix it for this release?"


• "I'm a fucking stupid cockmaster general who doesn't pay attention, gets paid way more than I deserve and I write shitty code. Because I think I'm better than you, you need to let me check in".

Ok so that last one was made-up, but if I heard someone being honest, I'd probably be more receptive to their wishes. Until then, no you can't check-in, dickhead. No, we won't fix that customer issue you've been sitting on for 4 months, wank-for-brains. And the next time you take a vacation you leave a point of contact, smeghead.

Fuck all of you, I'm gonna check in a virus and be done with it. Who wants to be a project manager?