Openbravo 2.40 Update

Last week I was unfortunate enough to travel through London on the next day of the opening of the now infamous Heathrow Terminal 5 and my two bags were among the 15,000 pieces of luggage that got lost in those days. Luckily both of them were eventually recovered and arrived safely home, even if 3 days later than expected.

This experience reminded me of how difficult it is to launch a new complex system. In that respect Openbravo ERP 2.40 is no different and it is also experiencing some delays. We were hoping to freeze our code today, but we had to extend that milestone by two weeks, one of which we hope to recover later on because we now have an automated way of building the installer and we can generate one much faster.
So here is our new schedule:

• Code freeze: April 18th
  
• Installer ready and beginning of Acceptance Testing: Apr 21st
• Acceptance Testing complete and alpha availability: Apr 28th
• Beginning of beta: May 30th
• Production: June 30th

I would like to take this opportunity to clarify a bit the purpose and mechanics of the alpha cycle. The goal of this phase is to allow the community to evaluate the new release and help us stabilize it. Since it is not intended for production purposes, we will only support fresh test installation and we do not intend to publish an upgrade path to 2.40 alpha nor one that will allow to upgrade to a production version.

Additionally, during the alpha cycle, the engineering team will be focused on fixing bugs, both backlog bugs from previous releases and new issues reported during the alpha testing itself. Because of that, it is likely that we will release various versions of the alpha release (alpha1, alpha2, etc.), each incorporating an increasing number of bug fixes.
We haven't decided the frequency of these updates and we intend to take that pragmatically, balancing two different priorities: avoid the need for people to refresh their testing environment and allowing them to work on the most stable code available.

Finally, in preparation to this release cycle we will create a new forum dedicated to questions and comments on this new release. We think we will call it Early Release Discussions but we haven't finalized the name yet.
The rationale for a separate forum is to keep separate as much as possible the production version from this early release to minimize the impact on the production users.