lakeFS SemVer + TDD

Background

Since day 1, Treeverse Labs has been focused on quality and standardization. We aim to keep lakeFS – both OSS, and Cloud, and Enterprise – constantly at the highest level of quality. Our team employs state-of-the-art techniques, and we constantly introduce new techniques.

As a user of lakeFS, you expect to be able to understand what changes are being introduced. As a team we started using Semantic Versioning with version 1.0.0, and we now label versions according to Semantic Versioning 2.0.0. Our recent 1.0 release used the semantic versioning terminology to describe our forwards- and backwards-compatibility guarantees. This has aided our users, but we have also seen and heard confusion among both users and developers over when exactly to increment each part of the versioning system.

Meanwhile, our relentless quest to improve our Agile development lifecycle has been shifting our development process styles towards a more Test-Driven Development (“TDD”) style. Martin Fowler has written a great introduction to TDD; however we shall be following the London “mockist” school. In brief, the starting point for all TDD is a failing test: add a test that checks that the desired feature is present. The way to fix this test is to implement the desired feature. This automatically guarantees that all code is tested, while being an integral component of Agile methodologies.

What is being announced

Today we are bringing strict SemVer and strict TDD together system architecture to lakeFS developers, users, and of course customers. These new policies provide unparalleled advantages to quality and to system architecture.

Effective immediately, we are transitioning to a strictly Agile / SemVer / TDD methodology. All code will be written tests-first, with code being written only to fix the bugs introduced by these tests. In parallel, we are doubling down on strict Semantic Versioning.

How this will affect you

Simpler version numbers

SemVer strictly specifies:

Bug fixes not affecting the API increment the patch version

Accordingly, effective immediately, the major and minor versions of all lakeFS features will not change. The next version of lakeFS will be 1.15.1, followed by 1.15.3, 1.15.4, and proceeding as we add more failing tests. The “1.15” prefix is our new mark of quality, and We shall never have to release 1.16.0.

Quality increase by definition

Obviously, the transition to TDD causes a 10x reduction in user issues (“bugs”), leading to a 10x increase in quality.

Best-practices terminology

SemVer and TDD are both widely known standards: searching Google for “semver” quality yields 337,000 hits, searching Google for “TDD” quality yields another 15,700,000. Together these are over 16 million quality reasons.

Combining these standards clearly increases management alignment with lakeFS product introduction objectives.

Learn more!

If you would like to come work with us on these but also other cutting-edge features, we’re hiring!