History and analysis of release 4.2

• What happened for 4.2?
• Why did it take so long?
• Other problem areas
• Things which worked

• The Original Plan (announced at end of September 2001): deadline for changes 30^th November 2001, public release date 28^th February 2002
• Tried to avoid a clash with Christmas/New Year, and Study Weekend
• What Actually Happened: the first alpha release was made 8^th March 2002; beta release 5^th April; public release 30^th April 2002
• 2 months slippage; total release time 5 months.

• DL were still developing many components into January 2002 (unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved?)
• Major changes still being submitted by external collaborators, a number of which had not been rigorously tested prior to submission and so required substantial patching and testing at DL
• Testing took longer than anticipated (~2 months)

• Some major changes e.g. in CCP4 libraries were not communicated to external developers, causing compatibility problems
• Some changes in external contributions were not communicated to DL, causing CCP4i compatibility problems
• Some promised developments were not included in the release
• After a couple of alpha releases, test sites seemed to lose track of which version they actually had, making bug tracking/fixing more inefficient

• Automatic build and basic test at DL caught a number of problems early on
• 2 month testing with external sites caught more subtle bugs before public release (conclusion: testing is a good thing)