Interviews on release management

Last night I returned from the Mataró conference where I spent the last four days as a researcher interviewing 20 free software developers from a variety of projects about release management in their projects. The aim of this study is to get a better picture of what processes, practices and tools are currently being employed by free software projects during release management and to identify problems. I'm very grateful to the people who agreed to participate in the interviews. I know that everyone was very busy with their work, and I'm glad they managed to free up some time for the interviews.

I was quite surprised how exhausting it is to perform interviews. You'd think it's no work since the other people are doing most of the talking, but I was really very tired at the end of the day. Maybe this is because I tried to summarize the interviews as I listened, which is quite a significant challenge. Anyway, I also recorded the interviews and over the next few weeks I'll listen to the interviews again and go through my summaries to make some sense out of this data. I definitely got some good input and ideas during the interviews.