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== Timoteo Ponce's blog ==
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Code freeze

best practices code freze software development
When you are developing something in a constant pace and everything is moving smoothly, how do you test?

Do you stop coding and then test what you've done? and then go back to code?



This may work for some people, but I struggle when I have to multi-task (this does not apply for TDD) and some of the people I know have the same feeling.

A while ago I worked in a project where there was a 'code freeze' day, in this day nobody could commit anything to the repository and everything you had to do was to test and register the bugs you've found.

This was something conflictive for us, our how development model was to produce something and to deliver as soon as possible, trying to fix the bugs as soon as they were registered.

Advantages

  • One of the advantages we found using this practice was that the bugs were found faster.
  • We could plan and estimate all our bugfixes.
  • All bugs were easily reproducible.
  • All bugs were registered and assigned properly. 
  • We switched roles, for one weekday we turned into testers (and loved the idea of relaxing while working).
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