So we have some problems:
- patches wait 7-14 days before shipping
- there's lots of incentive for cherry picking, out-of-band releases, and holding off from releasing or freezing
- it's difficult to keep track of the state
- our branching model makes it easy for commits to go missing from one branch or another
- our week is dominated by brief periods of intense action
- the release is the central event of the week
- all QA, the weekly meeting, and the overwhelming majority of our commits all happen within 24 hours of a release[1]
- most of the time things are on stage the environment is idle and unwatched.