... or a belated new year's resolution

This is just a copy of what I've just blogged over at use.perl.org. However, I thought people here might be interested in my foolishness too.

A few weeks back Tony Bowden nagged me for the Nth time (sorry again Tony) to upload a new version of Test::Class to CPAN.

Various poor innocents, Tony included, have been putting up with some non-CPAN releases of Test::Class containing a mixed bag of bug fixes, experiments and new features.

I hadn't made a new CPAN release because of the long list of changes and fixes that I wanted to make to the module. With a little bit of work, so I thought, I could get everything finished! People would stand in awe of all the shiny new Test::Class goodness :-)

Unfortunately the Free Time Fairy never visited and the next release remained "ready in a couple of weeks" for over year and a half.

This is from somebody who preaches about the good things open source and agile development methods give you. Somebody who says regular incremental releases are a good thing.

Bad Adrian. No cookie.

Fortunately Tony's polite poking had some effect on this occasion. I did some tidying and Test::Class 0.06_1 hit CPAN. I knew I would quickly fall back into my old habits, so I told Tony:

My new years resolution is now to fix at least one bug/feature a week, so expect a new dev release tomorrow night.

Somehow Test::Class 0.06_2 hit CPAN the next day. Amongst other things it fixed a bug David Wheeler had reported and patched in... gosh where does the time go... January 2002. (Bad Adrian).

After one more week, through some miracle, another Test::Class release managed to escape my subversion repository. Three weeks with a new release each week! How long could this continue?

While exchanging e-mails with David on this very topic I wrote:

Maybe I should blog it to use.perl.org - that way I'd have the threat of public humiliation.

Which David thought "A very good idea. ;-)"

I think it's a jolly good idea too. However, since I don't think there's a year's worth of improvements to be made to Test::Class I'm going to modify my resolution to:

I resolve to make one incremental improvement to my particular corner of the software development world (a new module, a maintenance release, a published article or presentation, etc.) for every week in 2004. Fifty two in all. I'll blog about each one here.

Since we agile folk like public visible charts of progress I introduce you without further ado to...

As you can see I have some catching up to do. But considering I didn't start until 24 January - not too bad. I wonder how the rest of the year will go?

Feel free to pop back at the start of 2005 to point and laugh :-)