Leaderboard

I have to strongly disagree the timing of changes against actual release date is a very key. Also as you get nearer the release date the types of changes allowed into the release should change. In the early part of the release cycle the release manager should be locked away in a cage with a cover over it; the only gatekeeping should be your standard SCC control process, which should include things like nightly builds and automatic regression testing. At this time new "agreed" functionality is added and bugs fixes applied and yes it can and in some cases should be a free for all. As the time to release gets nearer the process changes, there comes a point that new functionality should not longer be allowed, functionality added that may not really work as expected or at all, may need to be pulled from the release, this sort of decision is hard and based on a mixture of risk against what the customer has been promised. The release manager at this point is out of his cage and working up to full paranoid mode. By now your regression testing suite should be extensive, however you will also need to be doing manual testing and stressing of system as regression testing can never cover the full functionality of a system. In the final run up to the release no change other than bug fixes should be allowed and even then the developer should be made to walk over blazing hot coals first to see that they really are serious in their commitment to them. In my past I have worked as a release manger on several high value financial systems (oil trading and Europe bond markets) The reality is that even following due diligence and good regression test does not mean you have not introduced an unexpected problem. On the systems I was working on a full test cycle to run through all the test case was in the order of a week. As a release manger, I have had many experiences of developers saying "I have found a bug and this is the fix, do not worry nothing else will be affected" followed a week later by "ahh I did not see that coming". As a developer I have had experiences where I have found a bug and thought of simple small fix only to be caught out by and unexpected side effect or impact. Programming is not easy especially in modern large systems and even the very best developer can and at time will get it wrong. So lets hear it for release mangers they are human too.

Just closing the loop on this topic. Below is the screenshot of the fastest solution to date that does include the buffer allocation (array creation) as part of the code that is being bench marked. Thanks for everyone help. PJM