Additional environment for testing - GeorgeTheBeard/Notes GitHub Wiki

Hi, Sir. We need your approval to set up an additional environment for testing purposes on HP project to reduce the delivery time.

Let me explain this need. According to statistics, about 75% of delivery time feature is spending after development finished. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AeYEqWceATE8gvdd0JANsGVmPf58dyC2/view

The questions is: What does it takes so long? And short answer: waiting for bugfixes. According to current process after a coding phase features form a release candidate branch. This branch gets tested on staging, discovered bugs gets fixed and functionality released. Sounds good so far. However a quality of features is really low. Arguably speaking there are 2 major/blocker bugs per feature. And even bugs-free features got suck till every major bug related to release branch become fixed. For a week or more. You can see count of bugs over time. Statistics includes legacy bugs and bugs reported by clients but the trend is clear. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oI1YoQp5ZCx46T1CpsZoHSbfXTnpbxRq/view

What can we do about it? There are several countermeasures that we are implementing already:

  1. Additional QA helps to find bugs.
  2. Release smaller, release often. Less features in release candidate means less bugs.
  3. Trying to stay focused on release blockers during work distribution among developers.

What we are planning to work on:

  1. Improve unit tests code coverage (about 36% so far)
  2. Work with developers to improve quality of developed features.

However the problem of the process is in features that are waiting too long on staging environment. To handle this situation we want to create an additional environment for testing. After the development and before staging features should be tested on this new environment. By using this workflow new functionality will arrive on staging in much better quality and an idle time will be reduced significantly.

This solution was discussed and supported by a process improvements work group and devlead. According to his calculations Testing environment will cost us about 50% of existing staging.

So can you please approve additional environment? Feel free to share with me any questions or concerns.