blueCAT Phases

blueCAT is being adopted since March 2009 and defines a sequence of "cycles" during the development, structured as follows:

  1. During normal periods, blueMarine development goes on without any particular restriction; new features are added, both in the trunk and in the incubators, and submissions of defects are always accepted and worked on depending on their complexity and urgence.
  2. At a certain point, the Feature Freeze (FF) period is entered: in this phase, requests for new features are accepted but queued until the next development cycle starts. Only new Blocker and Critical defects are accepted, while those of lower priority are postponed for the next cycle. Development goes on normally in the incubators.
  3. When Feature Freeze period is over, the High Resistance (HR) period is entered. In this phase any new request or defect submission is normally queued for later work (exceptions could be made for specific Blocker or Critical defects), while all the efforts are focused on fixing the accepted issues. Lower priority issues scheduled for the incoming release, but needing more effort than the original estimates might be dropped and postponed in order not to delay too much the schedule.
  4. During the High Resistance period, one or more Release Candidates (RC) are released (e.g. 0.9.RC1, 0.9.RC2), and members of the blueCAT program try them, expressing a judgement on the overall quality: basically a "go"-"nogo" feedback. When the majority of testers give a "go", the current RC is promoted as a General Available (GA) and becomes an official release (e.g. 0.9.GA). At this point the HR period is over and the cycle restarts from the beginning.
  5. In some cases it's possible that simpler new features and bug fixes can be released as patches by means of the Update Center, rather than a full new release. The process for releasing the patches is subjected to the same "go"-"nogo" judgement by the blueCAT members, but formally there are not FF or HR periods. In these cases a third version number is used (e.g. 0.9.1.RC1, 0.9.1.GA).