Back in 2008, at Tikifest Strasbourg, the Tiki community decided to move from a flexible release schedule to one that has a pre-determined time between releases. In the spirit of the best practice of Release Early Release Often, we decided on a 6 month time between releases. Regular releases provide a consistent rhythm and cadence which provides for predictable continuous improvement and ensures that users never have to wait too long before they can use new developments that are available in the latest major release , benefits that we have found to be exceedingly valuable.
This has worked somewhat well for us over the years. If you look at the history of release dates below, we have always been a little late on some releases but managed to catch up by making it a point to release the next release early. Talking to the developers, one finds that there has always been some stress involved with trying to keep with a 6 month timeline, but there is a general recognition of "no pain no gain". However, starting at around 2013, the stress of releasing so often has become an increasing chord amongst developers, and people wondered about the point of releasing another release quickly after a delayed one simply to "catch up" with the predetermined schedule.
After Tiki 13, we "skipped one release" as far as the schedule was concerned, because the Tiki 12 LTS to Tiki 15 LTS cycle involved major upgrades to Tiki with the introduction of the Bootstrap framework that needed to make it into the next LTS version (Tiki 15), and none of the developers felt that keeping to the schedule was more important than having a good LTS release. Since then, we've gravitated towards a 9 month rhythm and going back to a 6 month rhythm now seems tough. The good news is that Tiki 15 (the best Tiki ever by quite a lot) is far advanced and should be released by March 2016 at the latest.
Going forward once Tiki 15 is released though, the question is what is the ideal time we should aim for between releases? At TikiFest Fosdem 2016 at the end of January, we'd like to make a decision about this. To get some data to help that decision making process, please participate in the following poll. Feel free to add a comment to the page as well. Thanks for your participation!
Past release dates
Tiki 3 LTS: May 2009
...6 months later... Tiki 4: Nov 2009
...7 months later...Tiki 5: June 2010
... 5 months later... Tiki 6 LTS: Nov 2010
... 7 months later... Tiki 7: Jun 2011
... 5 months later ... Tiki 8: Nov 2011
... 7 months later ... Tiki 9 LTS: Jun 2012
... 6 months later ... Tiki 10: Dec 2012
... 7 months later ...Tiki 11: Jul 2013
... 5 months later ... Tiki 12 LTS: Dec 2013
... 8 months later ... Tiki 13: Aug 2014
... 9 months later ... TIki 14: May 2015
... 10 months later at the latest ...Tiki 15 LTS: Mar 2016 at the latest
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