Developer team milestones

Vanilla Forums
Vanilla Forums
edited August 2018 in Dev & Ops

R&D is in a brave new world as of this sprint, planning and executing the first pieces of the Knowledge Base project using a process for which we've spent a long time preparing. I thought it'd be fun to look back at how things have changed over the years to give folks perspective on far we've come.

  • July 2009: Vanilla 2.0 lands with a bang on GitHub, in 1 giant commit. Everyone just codes against stage branch and then sometimes we merge it into master and pray.
  • March 2010: Tim is hired, increasing the dev team size by 50%.
  • Sept 2011: Lincoln takes over support and whatever else is laying around.
  • Aug 2012: Tim becomes Director of Infrastructure ("Ops" begins).
  • Feb 2013: We build & ship Groups v1 in 10 days. XO Group launches on it in April.
  • April 2014: We start using pull requests (usually).
  • May-July 2014: Todd creates Hub & Node. MFP & EA launch on it immediately; Adobe follows in September. Todd creates Subcommunities in December.
  • Jan 2015: First services developer hired (Ryan). We begin writing release notes and VIPs are put on a release schedule, getting them in sync for first time.
  • Nov 2015: R&D team is created (Todd, Linc, Becky, Ryan). Team Awesome is formed. R&D begins 2-week sprints with 1 dev on support rotation. We file GitHub issues before beginning work for the first time and always use PRs. Projects are mostly solo, sometimes in pairs.
  • Jan 2016: We begin publishing release notes and finally abolish stage branch from product repos.
  • Sept 2017: First support developer hired (Dani).
  • Jan 2018: R&D team adopts basic scrum process (planning, demo, & retrospectives). Laura becomes product owner of support team. Todd begins transition to product owner role for R&D.
  • March 2018: Customer Advisory Board meets for the first time.
  • June 2018: Support team adopts full scrum process. R&D essentially ends support duties.
  • Aug 2018: R&D team adopts full scrum by taking over technical planning, organizing around customer deliverables, and ending "solo projects". Double signoffs begin on core PRs.

I'm sure there will be plenty more milestones in the coming year.

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