Mythical Six Week Build Season

[marshall]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

Also, having the 6 week deadline directly amirrors how things go for me at work as a software engineer. You spend a lot of time working on a release, with a known target date. You meet that date and package up your "dot-zero" release. Then you turn around and start working on the "dot-one" release, fixing everything you didn't have time to fix within your schedule, or addressing bugs that were found late in the process. There's a lead time between finishing the release and going live, and as a result your under time pressure to finish the "dot-one" release so you go live with that instead of the "dot-zero". Then it goes live and your customers find all sorts of stuff you missed. So you go back and start working on fixing those in a "dot-two" release, again under a time crunch because you don't want to tick off your customers for too long.

I think it is worth mentioning that many software development shops are moving to continuous integration and software release cadence is being shortened. I live in the DevOps world (mostly on the Ops side but I speak the language of both camps) and it's an interesting analogy to what we (my team) go through with building two robots in FRC.