I’m just curious if the community considers it acceptable to use the term “Code Freeze” for situations where we stop development except for testing and fixing bugs.
Development Situation
We’re just finishing up our third and final sprint, which will be followed by a “Code freeze” and 2 weeks of Q/A testing. It is a big release and some components development have transcended all 3 sprints. Historically even though we call it a “Code Freeze” we still commit code to fix bugs.
Problem
Every release I try and correct my manager and co-workers that we should be calling it a “Feature Freeze”, because it’s pretty obvious that we’re going to find bugs and commit code to fix them as soon as we start heavy testing. But they still persist in calling it a “Code Freeze”. Sometimes we still have known bugs and declare a “Code Freeze”.
The Wikipedia definition seems to agree with me here
Analysis
I suspect that calling these situations a “Code Freeze” is some sort of willful Double Think to provide false confidence to stake holders. Or we are pretending to be in a “Code Freeze” situation because according to Scrum after every sprint we should have a shippable piece of software and it is the expectation we are following Scrum. So we must call it what Scrum expects instead of what it really is.
Conclusion
Am I over analyzing this? I just find it to be unhealthy to ignoring realities of situations and should either give it up calling it something it’s not or fix the root problem. Has anybody else had similar experiences with Code Freezes?
We use the term “Feature Complete”. All the features are coded and functional, but we’re heading into a test pass to confirm that there are no bugs. If there are bugs, we will find them, fix them, and retest. After we’re satisfied with the result, we’re “Code Complete”.