Just as November starts, we are working really hard to finish the next version of TRAC. Most of the new key features are locked and ready for quality assurance (QA). Some last-minute features somehow found their way into the pending version and will be surprising and welcome. More on those upon the release.
Last time I checked there where about 50 committed changes for the next release. This will probably rise as the QA-process starts – it usually does. The next release will not be as huge as the last 1.8.0, but it will come close in complexity.
Behind the doors there are happening interesting things as well. We are in the process of upgrading our development servers. Even thought TRAC is quite resource friendly, our stress-tests are not. And to be able to predict different workloads we need to scale up the hardware to be able to handle not only thousands but hundred of thousands of simultaneous users. Also we need to see how the systems handles huge amount of data. The system is designed to withstand workloads of billion of rows in the database with coherent data integrity.
More things happening behind the scenes are a new and improved documentation initiative. Even though the system is well documented we felt that the more in-depth technical documentation was not living up to our highly set standards. As a developer I must confess that writing documentation is not one of the most fun things a developer can do, but it is often underrated. It is easy to write miles of code. It is relativity easy to test it in the QA process. But what happens when a new developer joins the team? You need to have the documentation in order. Comments in the code is just not good enough.
We are now putting in many more hours than usual to sprint to the finishing line. Things are moving fast – and we love it!
