New development planning encourages consistent tech releases every 3 weeks
Key Takeaways
- Technical team switches to Release Cycle development planning
- Development update on GitHub every three weeks
- Tech savvy users will be able to interact before deployment on testnet
- First release on Wednesday, the 13th of April
Testnet DayBreak is live and the response so far has been profound. Thousands have interacted with our network, Block Explorer, and CLI Wallet already. And DayBreak’s growth continues every day. Existing features are always subject to improvement; planned features are always inching closer to implementation onto testnet; and technical wrinkles will always be ironed out to ensure a smoother experience for users.
With this in mind, Dusk Network’s technical team is adopting a new Release Cycle development planning that will benefit both developers and the community.
Release Cycle Explained: Every Three Weeks
Expectations on releases are currently based on milestone deadlines, also known as Waterfall planning.
For example, when we’re working on the CLI Wallet, we might first determine the number of issues there are. Then we determine the amount of time we’d need to close those issues. At the end, we settle on a deadline and a public release date for this new version.
Such scheduled version releases can cause issues, both for the development team and the community. If any of the issues or their resolution cause an unexpected incompatibility, the entire schedule is immediately thrown off and a delay has to be announced.
Instead, Dusk Network will adhere to a Release Cycle planning that will see a development release every three weeks on GitHub, which improves efficiency and ensures releases are published painlessly.
For example, when we’re working on the CLI Wallet, instead of providing a deadline for a new version release, we will be continuously working on it with verifiable documentation of work, published on GitHub every three weeks.
Certain edge cases, such as hotfixes of vulnerabilities, are not beholden to the scheduled Release Cycle, but will be resolved ad hoc. They will take precedence and are considered extra releases that do not need to follow the schedule. Interruptions of the schedule will only occur in the case of national holidays, special events, or the prioritized release of unrelated news.
What Does This Mean For The Community?
For the community, the benefits include no postponement of deadlined releases, and predictable update patterns, which in turn helps the developers. After all, developers will be able to prioritize certain tasks that take less than three weeks but might not be part of a forced deadline milestone development.
The Release Cycle approach is strictly a way to provide a consistent shape for publication of our work in the clearest terms possible. They are not deadlines to be made, nor are they tied to specific development sprints.
This new development approach does not affect the way Dusk Network’s marketing operates; it is a key move towards shipping code faster and, in addition, minimizing delays of announced news. Significant additions to DayBreak or its derivatives will be given the spotlight by the marketing team in dedicated documentation, be it a blog article to share or a resource paper for the community to consult.
How Can You Get Involved?
‘Release’ does not mean immediate deployment on testnet. This allows us to give GitHub users the opportunity to install, interact, and test anything that sees release on the Dusk Network GitHub. In fact, we highly encourage you to do so. Our community is vital to the network in many ways, and the ability of the public to provide feedback on releases is paramount.
We ask any users who have found an issue with any newly released features to contact us directly [email protected]. Provide your GitHub username so we can add you to our security advisory for further discussion. We always aim to respond as swiftly as possible.
What We’re Working On
These Release Cycles published every three weeks on DayBreak’s continued progress aren’t indefinite. Our main goal is to document the evolution from DayBreak Launch to DayBreak 2.0, the version necessary to usher in the next phase: Incentivized Testnet. To get there, implementation and optimization of a host of elements need to be accounted for, including the following:
As this new planning is enacted, we'll start to gradually adopt the release cycle on our GitHub repositories, starting from the Wallet-CLI and eventually implement it on all repositories related to testnet DayBreak.