Investigating modern release engineering practices

Abstract

In my PhD research I will focus on modern release engineering practices. First, I have quantified the time and effort that is involved in stabilizing a release. I found that despite using rapid release, the Chrome and Linux projects still have a period where they rush changes into a release. Second, developers typically isolate unrelated changes on branches. However, developers at major companies, such as Google and Facebook, commit all changes to a single branch. They isolate unrelated changes using feature-flags, which allows them to disable works in progress. My goal is to empirically determine the best practices when using flags and identify dead code. Finally, I will develop tool support to manage feature flags.