UI 1.1 Beta Period?

UI 1.1 Beta Period?


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I would like to repeat an earlier suggestion that UI 1.1 be taken
through a formal Beta program. Even an alpha if necessary (though
perhaps grabbing from the trunk will suffice as alpha).
Many of us are too busy to grab from the trunk until we have some
signal that the code is "worth testing" - That is the purpose of a
Beta, and it is good practice. Beta says "Hey, Development thinks
this code is pretty good, and our test cases pass, but we know it's
software and software always has bugs, so have at it folks, and knock
the stuffing out of this drop of code, so we can find the worst of the
bugs we've missed... even though we know we will never find them all."
It signals to developers to start using a piece of code - but to
understand it is not "production ready" until it exits Beta. People
don't get confused (the way they did when UI 1.0 came out) - that the
drop is *considered* ready for production. The risk is greater of
confusion around 1.1 since several people have written "The purpose of
1.1 is to make 1.0 production ready" - which is of course malarki
from a software engineering point of view.
If I've missed an announcement of such a Beta, well i'm probably not
the only one, since I'm on this list every day at least a few times.
For UI a goog beta could be as little as a week. It should be an
intense period for the community.
There is no knock intended against the developers of UI 1.0 or 1.1.
But this is complex code. In some ways (browser quirkiness, CSS
subtleties, etc.) more complex and tricky than even jQuery core.
THERE WILL BE BUGS IN UI 1.1 - and the development team should not try
to QA the whole release, and "put it out there" to let people find
bugs.
Everyone knows by now that 1.0 was not a 1.0, and saying "1.1 is here
to make the code production ready" is not only confusing from a naming
perspective (X.Y.Z -- .Y releases contain minor new features, .Z
releases are bug fixes) - but it also underscores what was evident
about 1.0. In reality - 1.1 should be called 1.0.1 if the intent is
as I have heard it said.
In any case - this is complex stuff. Have an announced Beta period -
let people know that that is code to test and bang on -- AND FILE
BUGS. And then fix (and verify) the bugs for the GA release of 1.1.
Have a formal criteria about the bug list status -- e.g.. no open sev
1 or sev 2 bugs -- to exit Beta.
Perhaps it is the lack of chatter on this list - and the informality
of developers saying they are "adding to the code" that continues to
make me worried, leery about 1.1 quality. I know there is probably
tighter management going on on Backpack, but the dev team cannot right
enough test cases to find all bugs, and there is no subsitute for a
real Beta to find - Real In-The-Wild bugs.
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