Solaris 10 Update 1 - Crunch Time!

So, we've moved into bug fixing mode over the last month, and now we are folding our feature gate and our bug fix gate into one. And the last minute features are crawling out of the woodwork! Lots of folks threatening to escalate up to Jonathan Schwartz (or telling me how important this feature is to Mr. Schwartz), or at the very least threatening to escalate to my VP, if I just can't understand why their feature is so important.

Here's the thing: Updates are *very* short releases. We just don't have that many builds, and as much as we all do testing, new features very often have bugs. Or defects, or issues - whatever you want to call them, I don't want more problems in my gate. It's important to Sun, and to me, to make each release a quality release, which is why at some point in time I just have to say "no" to new features. Fortunately, most folks are very understanding and will retarget their project to the next update. The releases really aren't that far apart.

Soon we'll be in "stopper" mode, which means I'll even have to say no to noncritical bug fixes.

All the same, I'm still really enjoying my work on the update. It's really cool getting insight into other groups, though it can also be frustrating getting insight into other groups ;-) The update core staff are all hardworking, intelligent people. I'm very lucky, indeed!

Now I just have to get back to my obnoxiously large RTI queue....