Fuel/Hard Code Freeze

Hard Code Freeze (HCF) is a quality-based milestone in the Fuel release cycle that marks availability of the first release candidate (RC1), after which only Critical bug fixes are allowed in the release branch.

Entry criteria:


 * swarm (fuel-qa/system_tests) pass rate is above 90%
 * less than 5 open High bugs, no open Critical bugs
 * less than 30 High and less than 10 Critical bugs were closed during the previous week

If HCF entry criteria are not met on schedule, HCF should be postponed.

If Critical bugs are found in an RC, more RCs are produced iteratively until QA team confirms that the latest RC is suitable for a stable release.

Just as with Soft Code Freeze, commits to the stable branch during and after HCF must follow the backporting process.