code and winter weather

[lehser]

So for a while at work, we were in "code freeze."  That's the interval when the code is as done as it's going to be before a release, and nobody can breathe on it, or look at it funny, much less change anything, lest you break it.  At my old job, there was a noticeable interval of this sort of thing, while the quality assurance people put the program through its paces before burning it to CD; they REALLY didn't want engineers doing anything that might foul up the tests that had already passed.  Code freeze is a reasonable thing, though of course you want to minimize the time you're in it.*

Then there's code slush. 

That's when your code is not quite frozen, or was frozen but needs fixing, but still can't have anything major or new started, because you're doing only what you need to do to release.  That's where I am.  I HATE code slush.  It feels very unstable--you're not making many changes, but any one of them could completely foul up the entire application, which means you get to start over (more or less) on the testing, and of course it means you're not as close to releasing as you'd like.  (As it happens, we have various server/networking dependencies to deal with, and a new web page that's being written, and so forth, so the release can't be now anyway, but I'd be just as happy to have the code stable.  Instead, we're looking at changing out a major libraries for compatibility with another local system, possibly updating our build platform, and generally doing some maximally slippery things.  All needed for the release.) 

All in all, being at work right now reminds me very strongly of walking around outside.  Not exactly my favorite. 

sigh.

*I think current feeling/best practice is against code freezes, but it's how I was trained, and hard to avoid with a tiny team.  Especially when there's good evidence that one or more team members doesn't really know how to merge changes across branches.