Building on top of my previous blog entry: Version Control Branching (extensively) Considered Harmful

I always discourage teams from preemptively branching a release candidate and then splitting their team to harden the release while rest of the team continues working on next release features.

My reasoning:

• Increases the work-in-progress and creates a lot of planning, management, version-control, testing, etc. overheads.
• In the grand scheme of things, we are focusing on resource utilization, but the throughput of the overall system is actually reducing.
• During development, teams get very focused on churning out features. Subconsciously they know there will be a hardening/optimization phase at the end, so they tend to cut corners for short-term speed gains. This attitude had a snowball effect. Overall encourages a “not-my-problem” attitude towards quality, performance and overall usability.
• The team (developers, testers and managers) responsible for hardening the release have to work extremely hard, under high pressure causing them to burn-out (and possibly introducing more problems into the system.) They have to suffer for the mistakes others have done. Does not seem like a fair system.
• Because the team is under high pressure to deliver the release, even though they know something really needs to be redesigned/refactored, they just patch it up. Constantly doing this, really creates a big ball of complex mud that only a few people understand.
• Creates a “Knowledge/Skill divide” between the developers and testers of the team. Generally the best (most trusted and knowledgable) members are pick up to work on the release hardening and performance optimization. They learn many interesting things while doing this. This newly acquired knowledge does not effectively get communicate back to other team members (mostly developers). Others continue doing what they used to do (potentially wrong things which the hardening team has to fix later.)
• As releases pass by, there are fewer and fewer people who understand the overall system and only they are able to effectively harden the project. This is a huge project risk.
• Over a period of time, every new release needs more hardening time due to the points highlighted above. This approach does not seem like a good strategy of getting out of the problem.

If something hurts, do it all the time to reduce the pain and get better at it.

Hence we should build release hardening as much as possible into the routine everyday work. If you still need hardening at the end, then instead of splitting the teams, we should let the whole swamp on making the release.

Also usually I notice that if only a subset of the team can effectively do the hardening, then its a good indication that the team is over-staffed and that might be one of the reasons for many problems in the first place. It might be worth considering down-sizing your team to see if some of those problems can be addressed.