| Previous · Next | |
| User | Message |
|
patspam
|
Date: 9/11/2006 0:26 am · Subject: Release Engineering · Rating: -2
I understand that a lot of work goes into the WebGUI releases and PlainBlack is dedicated to the quality of their product, and I don't want to cheese anyone off by saying this, but the latest "Search broken in the latest release" highlights a pretty fundamental issue with the release engineering that's being applied to WebGUI. I've been deploying and maintaining WebGUI systems for at least the past 18 months and in that time it's become pretty clear to me that the stable label is not appropriate for the latest WebGUI release. We all love the new features and fixes that come out with each release but PlainBlack isn't doing themselves any favours with this approach. I love installing the latest beta and playing with the new features on my own dev servers but for live websites we need to be able to trust the stable label. One suggestion would be that a release isn't marked as stable until PlainBlack has deemed it suitable to deploy on their own hosted sites. Again, I hope this doesn't cause offense. I think this is an important issue that needs to be addressed for the sake of WebGUI and its users. Regards, Patrick |
| Back to Top |
Rate [ | ]
|
|
JT
|
Date: 9/11/2006 1:40 am · Subject: Re: Release Engineering · Rating: 15
> I understand that a lot of work goes into the WebGUI releases and PlainBlack is >dedicated to the quality of their product, and I don9t want to cheese anyone off by >saying this, but the latest "Search broken in the latest release" highlights a pretty >fundamental issue with the release engineering that9s being applied to WebGUI. I9ve >been deploying and maintaining WebGUI systems for at least the past 18 months and in >that time it9s become pretty clear to me that the stable label is not appropriate for >the latest WebGUI release. We all love the new features and fixes that come out with >each release but PlainBlack isn9t doing themselves any favours with this approach. I >love installing the latest beta and playing with the new features on my own dev servers >but for live websites we need to be able to trust the stable label. > One suggestion would be that a release isn9t marked as stable until PlainBlack has >deemed it suit! able to deploy on their own hosted sites. > Again, I hope this doesn9t cause offense. I think this is an important issue that >needs to be addressed for the sake of WebGUI and its users. You need to understand that we run each release through an automated test suite before the release. At the time of the release it was believed that it was stable enough to install on our own servers. In fact, we did install it on plainblack.com, and it was our intent to install it on our other servers the day after the release. In this case there wasn't an automated test to cover the case that caused the broken search. The next release will include more tests for the search so that this particular problem won't happen again. However, WebGUI is a huge codebase, and we didn't start using an automated test suite until this year, so it's not possible to have a complete test suite at this point. After having done software engineering for the past 16 years, and having friends in software engineering for far longer than that, I can tell you that there is no such thing as stable software...at least not with the rapid development of features that our customers demand from us. If we were able to spend two years stablizing each release it could probably done. However, if we did that, we would be very far behind our competition. I'm not saying all this because I think we're doing things perfectly, but to inform you that we're not doing things hap-hazzardly. Quite to the contrary we do the best we can, and we are improving our processes as we see opportunities to do so. Also note that your comment, is not terribly helpful to us. While somewhat useful to know that you're not pleased...what would really be useful is if you made suggestions for improvement. And in order to do that, you must first understand what we do at this point. Please keep your comments coming, but in the future I'd appreciate it if your comments not only told us what you don't like, but suggested remedies, a course of action, or some other constructive criticism, rather than just criticism. JT ~ Plain Black ph: 703-286-2525 ext. 810 fax: 312-264-5382 http://www.plainblack.com I reject your reality, and substitute my own. ~ Adam Savage |
| Back to Top |
Rate [ | ]
|
|
patspam
|
Date: 9/11/2006 2:21 am · Subject: Re: Release Engineering · Rating: 5
JT,Thanks for you reply. I understand that no software is bug free. My goal is to stimulate discussion of the issue. If no-one else feels this is a problem then feel free to disregard. Two suggestions I'd make:
The FreeBSD project is several orders of magnitude more complicated than WebGUI and yet they manage to achieve very high release quality standards. Maybe WebGUI could take a few pointers from their release engineering process (detailed here), maybe not. It's up to you guys. I'd just like to be able to trust the WebGUI stable tag more than I currently do. Patrick |
| Back to Top |
Rate [ | ]
|
|
maxscience
|
Date: 9/11/2006 3:29 am · Subject: Re: Release Engineering · Rating: 8
I agree with you Patrick.There are several "basic" bugs I reported that makes me also think that at this point, WebGUI isn't really "stable". JT probably thinks his software is the most complicated in the planet but this is not the case as Patrick noted. I encourage JT to listen more to his community without this useless aggressive stance. Just as an example, a couple of months ago in a discussion in the dev forum, I recommended that users expected to have all keywords searched by default when using the Search function in WebGUI. This "feature" was added just in 7.0.6! WebGUI is capable of very complicated things but fails on some basic others.  Mac and Mac OS X Server power user
|
| Back to Top |
Rate [ | ]
|
|
JT
|
Date: 9/11/2006 9:35 am · Subject: Re: Release Engineering · Rating: 2
I'll take your comments to heart. I've read the BSD release documents before. They are quite good for how their system works, but due to how our upgrade process works, won't work for us, at least not directly. However, I'll re-read them and see if there is any more goodness we can take from those documents and apply to our process. WebGUI is at a very funky place in it's life right now. I can assure you that we already have measures in place that we'll be announcing at the WUC on Wednesday to ensure that the WebGUI releases get more and more stable over time. It is our goal, and in our best interest just as it is yours. The less bugs we have to troubleshoot in support, the more time we can spend giving quality support on implementation issues. Thanks for your comments. > Right now PlainBlack.com says "The latest version of WebGUI is 7.0.7 (stable)". You >probably don9t want to be encouraging people to download this version if it9s >broken.Currently you release nightly builds and stable builds. I would suggest renaming >what you currently call stable as beta. Many people will still want to download these >builds, and these people will most likely catch the extra problems that slip through >your test suite. Beta builds that exist in the wild for long enough without reports of >major issues can graduate to the stable label. > The FreeBSD project is several orders of magnitude more complicated than WebGUI and >yet they manage to achieve very high release quality standards. Maybe WebGUI could take >a few pointers from their release engineering process (detailed here), maybe not. It9s >up to you guys. I9d just like to be able to trust the WebGUI stable tag more than I >currently do. > Patrick > > http://www.plainblack.com/webgui/dev/discuss/release-engineering/2 > Unsubscribe JT ~ Plain Black ph: 703-286-2525 ext. 810 fax: 312-264-5382 http://www.plainblack.com I reject your reality, and substitute my own. ~ Adam Savage |
| Back to Top |
Rate [ | ]
|
|
leonardleblanc
|
Date: 9/11/2006 10:00 am · Subject: Re: Release Engineering · Rating: 12
I’ve been developing web-based software in perl for a number of years nowand I think you guys are doing a great job. I too feel the frustration when a release is buggy as I have a number of live WebGUI sites up, but as long as you properly test the release before deploying you shouldn't have any problems with your production server. This is a good rule of thumb when releasing anything to a production server whether it's WebGUI or the latest Microsoft patch/kernel upgrade. Considering the software is open source, I think the bugs are minimal and seem to be fixed fairly quickly. I'm sure we'll see the search feature fixed very soon so just hold off upgrading until then -- not a big deal in my eyes. Kudos to everyone at Plain Black. Keep up the great work guys! -- Lenny Leblanc MacroElite Corp. http://www.macroelite.ca ________________________________________ From: webguidev@plainblack.com [mailto:webguidev@plainblack.com] On Behalf Of jt@plainblack.com Sent: Monday, September 11, 2006 9:36 AM To: leonardleblanc@shaw.ca Subject: [wg-dev] Re: Release Engineering JT wrote: I'll take your comments to heart. I've read the BSD release documents before. They are quite good for how their system works, but due to how our upgrade process works, won't work for us, at least not directly. However, I'll re-read them and see if there is any more goodness we can take from those documents and apply to our process. WebGUI is at a very funky place in it's life right now. I can assure you that we already have measures in place that we'll be announcing at the WUC on Wednesday to ensure that the WebGUI releases get more and more stable over time. It is our goal, and in our best interest just as it is yours. The less bugs we have to troubleshoot in support, the more time we can spend giving quality support on implementation issues. Thanks for your comments. > Right now PlainBlack.com says "The latest version of WebGUI is 7.0.7 (stable)". You >probably don9t want to be encouraging people to download this version if it9s >broken.Currently you release nightly builds and stable builds. I would suggest renaming >what you currently call stable as beta. Many people will still want to download these >builds, and these people will most likely catch the extra problems that slip through >your test suite. Beta builds that exist in the wild for long enough without reports of >major issues can graduate to the stable label. > The FreeBSD project is several orders of magnitude more complicated than WebGUI and >yet they manage to achieve very high release quality standards. Maybe WebGUI could take >a few pointers from their release engineering process (detailed here), maybe not. It9s >up to you guys. I9d just like to be able to trust the WebGUI stable tag more than I >currently do. > Patrick > > http://www.plainblack.com/webgui/dev/discuss/release-engineering/2 > Unsubscribe JT ~ Plain Black ph: 703-286-2525 ext. 810 fax: 312-264-5382 http://www.plainblack.com I reject your reality, and substitute my own. ~ Adam Savage http://www.plainblack.com/webgui/dev/discuss/release-engineering/4 Unsubscribe |
| Back to Top |
Rate [ | ]
|
|
JT
|
Date: 9/20/2006 11:22 am · Subject: Re: Release Engineering · Rating: 3
Thanks for your support Lenny.Also, I should have mentioned before, if anyone wants to help in contributing tests, we'd love your support. The more tests we have in our test suite, the better our releases will be. Contact Roy Johnson or Colin Kuskie if you want to join the effort. They're both on this list, and on the IRC channel if you're interested. On Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:00:49 -0500 <leonardleblanc@shaw.ca> wrote: > leonardleblanc wrote: > > I�ve been developing web-based software in perl for a number of years now > and I think you guys are doing a great job. > > I too feel the frustration when a release is buggy as I have a number of > live WebGUI sites up, but as long as you properly test the release before > deploying you shouldn9t have any problems with your production server. This > is a good rule of thumb when releasing anything to a production server > whether it9s WebGUI or the latest Microsoft patch/kernel upgrade. > > Considering the software is open source, I think the bugs are minimal and > seem to be fixed fairly quickly. I9m sure we9ll see the search feature > fixed very soon so just hold off upgrading until then -- not a big deal in > my eyes. > > Kudos to everyone at Plain Black. Keep up the great work guys! > > -- > Lenny Leblanc > MacroElite Corp. > http://www.macroelite.ca > > ________________________________________ > From: webguidev@plainblack.com [mailto:webguidev@plainblack.com] On Behalf > Of jt@plainblack.com > Sent: Monday, September 11, 2006 9:36 AM > To: leonardleblanc@shaw.ca > Subject: [wg-dev] Re: Release Engineering > > JT wrote: > > I9ll take your comments to heart. I9ve read the BSD release documents > before. They are > quite good for how their system works, but due to how our upgrade process > works, won9t > work for us, at least not directly. However, I9ll re-read them and see if > there is any > more goodness we can take from those documents and apply to our process. > > WebGUI is at a very funky place in it9s life right now. I can assure you > that we already > have measures in place that we9ll be announcing at the WUC on Wednesday to > ensure that > the WebGUI releases get more and more stable over time. It is our goal, and > in our best > interest just as it is yours. The less bugs we have to troubleshoot in > support, the more > time we can spend giving quality support on implementation issues. > > Thanks for your comments. > > > > > > Right now PlainBlack.com says "The latest version of WebGUI is �7.0.7 > (stable)". You > >probably don9t want to be encouraging people to download this version if > it9s > >broken.Currently you release nightly builds and stable builds. I would > suggest renaming > >what you currently call �stable as beta. Many people will still want to > download these > >builds, and these people will most likely catch the extra problems that > slip through > >your test suite. Beta builds that exist in the wild for long enough without > reports of > >major issues can graduate to the stable label. > > The FreeBSD project is several orders of magnitude more complicated than > WebGUI and > >yet they manage to achieve very high release quality standards. Maybe > WebGUI could take > >a few pointers from their release engineering process (detailed here), > maybe not. It9s > >up to you guys. I9d just like to be able to trust the WebGUI stable tag > more than I > >currently do. > > Patrick > > > > �http://www.plainblack.com/webgui/dev/discuss/release-engineering/2 > > Unsubscribe > > > JT ~ Plain Black > ph: 703-286-2525 ext. 810 > fax: 312-264-5382 > http://www.plainblack.com > > I reject your reality, and substitute my own. ~ Adam Savage > > > http://www.plainblack.com/webgui/dev/discuss/release-engineering/4 > Unsubscribe > > > > http://www.plainblack.com/webgui/dev/discuss/release-engineering/5 > Unsubscribe JT ~ Plain Black ph: 703-286-2525 ext. 810 fax: 312-264-5382 http://www.plainblack.com I reject your reality, and substitute my own. ~ Adam Savage |
| Back to Top |
Rate [ | ]
|
