Friday, October 13, 2006

Last Minute Changes

For most people, last minute changes are very very annonying and it's not a good idea, because sometimes you are in a tight deadline and other people expect to have the most stable idea/product but since there's a last minute changes, you don't have time to test the latest changes and the result is the decrement of the quality or even worse, it might make the product unusable again. That's why sometimes developers tends to have a freeze phase when they don't accept new changes or CR (change request) and only concentrating on PR (problem report) and bug fixings. This is the best time to run a full testing cycle and stabilizing the product before it will be released.

Sometimes, last minute changes tends to make the schedule slips, just like what happened in some open source projects. They prefer to delay or postponed the release rather than delivering a buggy applications. Some people will get angry if they had to wait because they can't fulfill their promises, but i think it's better to wait for the final version which is more stable, secure, and robust.

One of the case that i experienced is with Slackware Linux. Slackware 11.0 had some delays before the final version was released at the beginning of this month (FYI, this is the longest development time in Slackware's history). But the result was very very stable and robust. Slackware 11.0 is still considered one of the most stable and secured distro out of the box and Pat is trying to defend that title or even improving it.

The conclusion: Sometimes, you have to dare to say NO when you are faced with last minute changes.

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