[russell]

That is a killer release cycle. It is a inefficient as hell. It encourages people to hide in the long deadline. Switch to 2 week releases, even if it is only internal. Eventually switch to two week releases to customers. They will get new goodies every two weeks and they wont have to wait months for bug fixes. Who knows, the discipline might solve part of your problem.

[firingtest]

Internal releases all automated so daily, hourly whatever in every commit and it's almost forbidden to keep your code more than a day at home! even if it's broken I force people to commit to keep it alive. If one code takes more than a day there is generally something with (design, task splitting etc.) unless we are introducing a big feature.

However based on comments I think focusing on important couple of features and try to deliver them in weekly of 2 weekly periods makes a lot of sense and should motivate people better.