We've just released Umbraco 4.5.2 beta which fixes 46 bugs that
have been reported by our awesome community. Please download it
today and help us test it so we can get a fast release. You'll
find a full change log in the downloads.
This brings the total number of bug fixes up to 88 since we
released Umbraco 4.5 two months ago. There's no way we could have
achieved this without the many people who've helped testing,
reporting and submitting patches to the issues. Thanks a
million!
With Umbraco 4.5.2 we'll finally have an ultra stable version of
Umbraco 4.5!
In retrospect - did we release v4.5 too
fast?
With almost a hundred bug fixes in just two months it's tempting
to question whether we should have released v4.5 at all. It's hard
to say as most of the issues was reported after
Umbraco 4.5 was released and we've had a beta versions for quite
some time. There'll always be bugs in software and when you push
the release button is always a question of when it's good enough.
If you never push the button, there'll never be a release.
However, I personally think we made a couple of mistakes. That's
alright. If we turn the mistakes into lessons learned it means
progress for the team and the project. And we're doing our very
best to learn. Here's what we've found so far:
- First of all our test cases were too simple, too narrow
and didn't change at all. We had a checklist of various
editing actions in combination with testing the Runway and Creative
Website Starter packages. This was very helpful in order to find
and fix bugs along the way, but this should have been combined with
random install of community packages in the Repository.
- Unit testing won't find everything. With
Umbraco 4.5 we finally added a testing suite with more than 100
unit tests and loads of hidden bugs were found. However, a simple
test suite will never be able to cover the many scenarios where
Umbraco is used and as such should only be a foundation. This is a
no-brainer, yet crucial to remember. With the many things covered
by unit tests, there's no longer a Core Team member not believing
in Unit tests as heaven sent. But robots will always be the
smartest of idiots.
- Enthusiasm is awesome but never overshadow the pursuit
of attention to detail. One of the things that always have
given me the biggest thrill is when tiny details in Umbraco gets
improved. In the enthusiasm of the major UI and performance
enhancements added to Umbraco 4.5 it was (too) easy to forget this
craving for nano management. But it's one of the things makes
Umbraco special - even though it can seem silly to spend days on
minor things. heck,
I even wrote a blog post about this four years ago.
- Don't live in a silo. While Umbraco might work
perfect for the scenarios used by members of the Core Team, we're
only a fraction of the active users. This means that we should be
much better to use 3rd party implementations, packages and
un-official "tricks" when testing a release. In addition to this,
we should involve 3rd party package developers as early as possible
and help with a plan on how to ensure that their packages work when
we release. Today an Umbraco implementation is often the sum of the
Core combined with a number of packages. If they don't work
together it can leave a beautiful Core useless.
- Raise the community to take even more
responsibility. As a community member who's business
depending on Umbraco, it's only natural to become disillusioned
when a new release doesn't work, forces you to change habits or
makes an upgrade impossible. Believe me, the Core Team have no
intention on doing this on purpose and it hurts badly when seeing
people frustrated. But we're no better than the information given
us. So be active. Tell us about what doesn't work and log issues in
the Codeplex issue tracker with thorough steps to reproduce. Good
bug reports take a lot of effort but in return you get better
software. And even better - participate in our beta programs. Many
of the bugs reported and fixed the past two months could have been
discovered weeks before the release if only we had gotten help with
better and more extensive testing. So help us, helping you.
We'll use this knowledge while we're building Umbraco 5. You'll
see more blog postings, more videos and more documentation about
the next version than ever before. We've learned a lesson.