I'm maintaining an open source framework (in Python on *nix platforms if that matters) for the first time in my life. It is pretty much pre-alpha, not much more then a scientific proof of concept, yet. But it is also already used in production by another department because it is the only framework globally that approaches their needs. Now there are two anti polar goals: quality and development speed.
Of course I want quality in form of documentation, unit tests, code reviews and some kind of "beta" usage, before I am confident to let a change be used in production. But the development team has dead lines and when they find a bug, which happens rather often in this prototype, then they need the bug fix to be in production very fast. I have currently no working solutions and our ideas diverge.
I think this project can't be the only one with that problem. How do other projects solve this?
I'm going to post my idea and the dev teams idea as answers for further discussions, both ways are not a solution though, because my idea basically only focusses on quality and their solution only focusses on speed.