Question

Consider the following scenario. You have recently delivered the first phase of a mission-critical software intensive system. All of your customers and stakeholders are very happy, and you proceed with the second phase of development. This phase will add another set of highly desired features and will take about a year to develop and deliver. You are doing incremental development, so multiple internal versions will be built and tested prior to delivery. You currently use a configuration management system, with all development organized in the trunk. You have a release plan which generally specifies the iteration in which the second phase features will be developed. All is going according to plan. About two months into the second phase, you get a call from your user point of contact. They have an urgent problem with the system and need you to address it. You have additional resources (developers, testers, equipment, etc) available to address the problem. However, it will require simultaneous development on the same system, with one team working on the fix and the other on the second phase.

Part 1) Explain how you would adapt the software process to simultaneously address the fix and continue work on the second phase features.

Part 2) Would you make any changes to your configuration management strategy to accommodate the fix? Why or why not?

Part 3) How would you structure testing of the fix prior to delivery?

Part 4) Would you consider including any features of Phase 2 in the “fix” delivery? What factors would drive your decision?

Answer 1

Part 1: I will make another repository and clone all the work of second phase on it. this will prevent any risk of changing first phase code and let you apply fix on the previous phase. My priority would be fixing the first phase first and the moving to the second phase.

Part 2: No, I will not make changes to configuration management apart from maintaining the flow simultaneously. Because development of second phase will be proceeding on another repository and the fixes are applied to the current phase.

Part 3: After fixing the first phase, again compilation of the first phase is done which leads to proper release of that phase. This will prevent any build of second phase from compilation and delivery of first phase is done.

Part 4: No, i will not include any feature of second phase in the fix because it may lead to further dependencies and their is a risk of clashing of processes internally, also it may lead to redundant feature for the first phase.