(2007-04-18) Socialtext Release Management

SocialText is sharing their Release Management process. It sounds like they have multiple Project Team-s each working on a Pro Ject, consisting of multiple Feature Set-s, each of which crosses Iteration boundaries. And they only integrate when a Feature Set is going to be Release-d. We had maintained this myth that not branching would help us to maintain agility, but at the last minutes things always came up and we'd get into what seemed like infinite loops of wait states. Our not-so-decoupled as we'd like codebase didn't help this. So we decided it would be good to start more habitual branching but to do we knew, based on experience, that we would need some process formalization to ensure that branches would get tested and merged with alacrity.

(They also have the complexity of dealing with a Product Line.)