Week 12 [Fri, Apr 2nd] - Project

Allowed in the v1.4 milestone:

fixing bugs
improving documentation
purely cosmetic enhancements e.g., alignments, style changes
improving code quality
improving tests
removing features

Not allowed in v1.4: adding features or doing major changes to existing features.

The goal of freezing features in the pre-release iteration is to subject the features to at least one round of intensive non-dev testing before they are released to the users. In a real project, minor or critical changes might be allowed even near a deadline -- but here, we do not allow any feature changes because it can start us on a slippery slope and many "is this change allowed?" queries. Therefore, v1.4 should not have any features that was not already tested in the PE-D).

FAQs:

• Q: Can we add a missing validity check for a user input?
  A: Yes, but only if its absence causes the software to mis-behave (i.e., it's omission can be considered a bug).
• Q: Testers have reported a missing feature (or a feature suggestion). Can we add it?
  A: Most teams receive such suggestions from testers as we allow feature suggestions in PE-D (but they are not allowed in the PE). You can use those suggestions when you envision future versions of the product (i.e., beyond v1.4 -- to improve your product design skills. But for now, focus on fixing bugs, and perfecting other aspects such as testing, documentation, code quality.
  Also note that given there's a feature freeze in v1.4, some lower-priority features can be argued as out-of-scope if there were other higher priority features that took up the available time in previous versions. Every team has to draw the line somewhere as there wasn't a lot of time to implement features.