The 5.3.0 development cycle has been unlike any in our 7+ year history.  In some respects this is good and in others – not so much.  As I explained in my Just Like Clockwork post, we are working hard to make monthly releases a habit and to have release schedules that are predictable.  DotNetNuke 5.3.0 marks the first major release we have attempted since splitting our engineering group into feature development and maintenance groups.  As always, doing anything for the first time can be challenging.

The maintenance group has gotten into a pretty good grove with our monthly releases, but adding an external group into the mix has added an additional level of complexity.  The maintenance group is able to make our changes in a single branch and quickly test, package and release our monthly stabilization releases.  Unfortunately, the feature dev group works in a separate branch which means code merges, integration testing, lots and lots of regression testing and in general a more complex testing and release process.  We certainly have learned quite a bit from this first cycle which we’ll apply to future major releases.

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