The ElectricAccelerator 7.2 “Ship It!” Award

Naturally with the release of ElectricAccelerator 7.2 a few weeks ago it’s time for another Accelerator “Ship It!” award. In keeping with our tradition, I gave each team member a LEGO figure that symbolized the release to me in some way, along with a a custom trading card giving the vital details: version, release date, and key features. Like a baseball card, the back is filled with a team roster and release statistics.

There are some great improvements in Accelerator 7.2 but there’s no particular unifying theme, so it was quite a challenge to choose a suitable minifig. One thing that stood out is that between the time management asked engineering to create a 7.2 release and the time that development was complete was only about three weeks. At the time we were actually in the midst of development on another release entirely, with a different set of new features. The 7.2 release was very much a, “Hey couldn’t you also cut a release right now while you’re at it?” And we did. Maybe it’s not as impressive as those guys that can cut a release every minute of every day, but for a team that usually does releases on a six-month cadence, a 3-week turnaround sounds like continuous delivery to me.

One thing enabled us to turn around the release that quickly: our code is (nearly) always shippable. That’s what led me to the minifig for this release: the sea captain, who’s always ready to “ship out” on short notice. Here’s the trading card that accompanied the figure:

Accelerator 7.2 “Ship It!” Card Front – click for full-size version

Accelerator 7.2 “Ship It!” Card Back – click for full-size version

Like the 7.1 card, the back of the 7.2 card incorporates stats for the current release, contextualized by stats for several previous releases:

• Number of days in development. This is just the number of days since the previous feature release — it is assumed that whatever features are in the new release, we started working on them more-or-less after the last release went out.
• JIRA issues closed.
• Total KLOC. This metric gives the total size of the Accelerator code base in thousands of lines of code, as measured with the excellent Count Lines of Code utility by Al Danial. This measurement excludes comments and whitespace.
• Change in KLOC. This is simply the arithmetic difference between the total KLOC for each release and its predecessor.

As always, my sincere gratitude goes to everybody on the Accelerator team, without whom this release would not have been. Thank you!