Checking in (Wave 1) Update 2 SP4 R3

This is waaaay overdue, I know. So here’s what happened. That little bit of scope creep I decided to take basically reset the whole sprint. I didn’t have to throw away any of the code but it did expose every assumption that was in code and multiplied my testing matrix by like 4-5x because I’m supporting many more use cases than before. I’d say the effort has been 40% new code, 60% testing.

Also I took a week off due to prior commitments away from my keyboard with friends and family.

So why did I decide to increase scope so late? Precisely because of how disruptive this change has been. If I didn’t do it now I’d be compelled to do it immediately after Wave 1 and it would interfere with waves 2-3 which are entirely different feature areas. All of the assumptions would be more entrenched and there was a good risk of shipping things that were wrong in subtle little ways–I definitely had to withdraw certain functionality that was overly specific. And aside from the “happy path” experience which was originally designed, I had to design and test a whole “graceful failure” path. This is essential work for tooling anyone else is going to use. Nothing has been wasted in this effort.

So where are we at? I’m writing more tests. I admit I’m not nearly as fast a tester as I am a dev and switching hats makes me miss the days of having dedicated QA. I’m fixing minor bugs. Don’t have an exact release date but “soon” ™.

Regards,

-ADG

P.S. I’m going to publish what’s in Wave 2 BEFORE it starts. I appreciate that the suspense is problematic.

2 thoughts on “Checking in (Wave 1) Update 2 SP4 R3

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s