Development Process

Roadmap

The team has a 6-12 months high level Roadmap which defines high level themes and features to be addressed in this timeframe.

Iterations

We will work in monthly iterations on the items on the roadmap. Iterations are roughly month based, rather than week based. We will begin a milestone on a Monday and end on a Friday, meaning that each milestone can have a different duration, depending on how the weeks align.

At the end of each iteration, we want to have a version of Visual Studio Code that can be used by the VS Code community. The work planned during an iteration is captured in the iteration plan (see Iteration Plans). The feature highlights of each iteration are highlighted in the release notes.

Planning

Before each milestone, we will prioritize features to implement and bugs to fix in the upcoming iteration. Bugs are assigned the milestone for the iteration. For new features, we create new issues and label them with Plan Item. Plan Items include a check list for the Definition of Done. The Bugs, Plan Items, and Feature Requests assigned to a milestone encompasses the planned work for the upcoming month. For each Plan Item, we include the checklist for b

Definition of Done

• Test Plan Item created
• Keyboard accessible
• Screen reader accessible
• Works with the different themes, including the high contrast theme
• Telemetry events in place
• Release notes updated

Inside an Iteration

We work in weekly segments:

• Week 1: Reduce debt introduced in the previous iteration, address critical issues uncovered in the previous iteration, plan the next iteration
• Week 2: Work according to the plan
• Week 3+: Work according to the plan
• Final Week: Endgame
  • the team tests the new features according to a test plan and updates the documentation.
  • we make a pre-release available on the 'insiders' channel and invite users to help us test the pre-release.
• Week 1 (next iteration):
  • monitoring the pre-release and fixing critical issues.
  • publish the release, sometime midweek, after 24 hours with no changes to the pre-release.

Triage

Bugs and features will be assigned a milestone, and within a milestone, they will be assigned a priority. The priority dictates the order in which issues should be addressed. An important bug (something that we think is critical for the milestone) is to be addressed before the other bugs.

To find out when a bug fix will be available in an update, then please check the milestone that is assigned to the issue.

Please see Issue Tracking for a description of the different workflows we are using.

Weekly

Each week we will manage work items, crossing off completed features, and triaging bugs. At the end of the milestone, we will strive for 0 bugs and 0 issues assigned to the milestone. Some bugs and features will then be either postponed to later milestones or moved back to the backlog.

End Game

The final week of the milestone is what we call the "end game" (see running the endgame). During this week we will wrap up any feature work, we will test using a test plan Iteration Plans, and then we will fix the critical bugs for that milestone.

During the endgame we make a build available on the insiders channel (see also. We will monitor incoming issues from this release, fix any critical bugs that arise, and then produce a final stable release for the milestone and the stable channel.

Before we publish builds we manually execute the Smoke Test on all supported platforms.