Last build

It's back; the week of the last build. Frenzy but quite, irritating but fulfilling.

Every four months or so, we, ClickSoftware R&D, publish a new release of Service Optimization. The last month of every release is a time of war – Engineering and QA battle out against the almighty bugs. We usually lose some fights and win others. The final battle is the week in which we must secure the last build. QA has the task of approving every single bug that was fixed for the release, making sure that no bug reappears suddenly. Engineering is supposedly out of the loop – looking into the next release and writing down trainings and documentation. But as we all know – something always goes wrong.

A bug in the last build week turning into a feature.

The week starts optimistic, stating that we are going to create the last build on the first day of the week, and spend the rest of it double checking. It usually takes about three to four hours when suddenly Olivier comes round and asks whether the "Internal Error" he just got is deliberate. Then there are the support calls that were opened two months ago, but just recently came across Engineering. A one minute look at the problem and Amit already knows that this is a bug that wasn't fixed yet, not even in the release we are trying to close. We are already three days into the week when an urgent meeting takes place to decide what to do with the importance 1 bug that was found by accident, when trying to call an SXP that has always worked (but never been used recently).

The only acceptable bugs during the week of the last build.

Thursday morning (I am reminding you that we are located in Israel and work from Sunday to Thursday) comes and last night's build has a great number – 3703. We must turn it into the last build and not ruin this no matter what! But then Lirit finds a problem in the documentation – stating that we round up the seconds instead of rounding down. A quick huddle in the corridor between Miriam and Lirit debating whether to fix the code or fix the documentation turns into a new bug, but at least it's a WORD bug that does not need to recompile and adjust the release number to 3704.

Lirit editing the documentation; if a bug is not a feature, then maybe it's just a documentation bug?

Thursday evening – it's all behind us. The release is already packaged and there is nothing we can do anymore. Just occasional temp fixes here and there…