Some time ago, I documented the Microspeak phrase to spin up/kick off a build, meaning to start a build, often with the suggestion that the build request comes outside of the normal cadence.

The concept of spinning up a build is linguistically productive, leading to the verb to respin meaning “To request that a new build be spun up”.

There are two common cases where you’ll see this phrase. (There might be others, but these two are most common.)

One is when a build has already spun up, and then somebody has an important fix that just missed the snap. For example, the fix might address a bug that prevents an important scenario from working. Without the fix, the resulting build would be largely useless anyway. In this case, the team might ask to “respin” the build, meaning to cancel the build in progress and start a new one (with the fix).

Another case where you see this phrase is when talking about branches which are very close to release. The proposed final build has been produced, and it is going through validation. To respin the build is to ask for a new build, typically after you make a critical fix.

Can we just release note this issue so we don’t have to respin?

Respinning a build typically pushes out the entire release timeline, since you have to wait for the new build and then go through a new cycle of validation.

A full respin is not feasible because it would disrupt the servicing train.

Note that the verb has been nouned. A respin is an act of respinning.

Even though kick off is a synonym for spin up, nobody ever says re-kick-off a build. It’s always respin (and not respin up either).

Bonus chatter: There is an internal tool for creating virtual machines for testing. It’s called Spin. It almost certainly gets its name from the concept of “spinning up” a virtual machine, meaning to get a virtual machine up and running.