[cle-release-team] Reviewing the CLE 2.9.3 release

[Neal Caidin]

Hi All,

On the call today we reviewed the 2.9.3 release. 

If there are ways to improve the process to do a better job for the next release, it would be good to capture this while the release is still fresh in our minds. 

Here are some of my takeaways from the meeting:

Now
-------------
* Dr. Chuck reminded us to stay positive and celebrate getting out another maintenance release. Good reminder IMO. Good to celebrate the things that were successfull about the release - fixing an important gradebook issue, getting AntiSamy on by default, having our 3rd maintanenance release since 2.9.0 was released in November. That's 3 maints in 10 months.

* My sense is that we are all disappointed at how late the release came out. We really wanted to get the release out in late July, not mid-late August. 

* We discussed the process - consensus vs having designated decision maker(s) for getting out the release. I got the sense that we are sticking with consensus.

* The consensus process did not break down. We did make decisions and stick with them, but they added up to a significant slip in the date. 

* Not everyone on CLE  release team is aware of overhead once release decision is made. We still need TCC approval and this particular build fell at the busiest time of year, plus Longsight group are the only ones building the releases. All the overhead adds up being a couple of weeks to get a release out, roughly, after the decision to release is made.


Future - things to improve the process
---------------------------------------------------------
* Supporting Anthony's proposal(s) for streamlining the TCC part of the process for maintenance releases is something that likely will help.

* Perhaps we should be firmer about adding new items in a release, blocker or no.  Though I think we all agree that https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-23733 is a blocker-level fix, perhaps we could have pushed out 2.9.3 without it and just included the fix in release notes as a later patch? That was one suggestion. Same with https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAM-973 though there was also consensus that this was not a blocker-level issue. Also don't forget we had WebDav issues crop up too. 

* How to be firmer in our scope management? We discussed having designated decision maker(s), but that didn't get much traction (sticking with consensus). And we discussed having a Rubric to help with the decision making. That idea was greeted with skepticism.  Figuring out if we want to be firmer in scope management and how to do it is probably worth more discussion/exploration IMO.

If you made it this far and didn't fall into TL;DR, would be interested in seeing reactions.

Cheers,
Neal



Neal Caidin
Sakai CLE Community Coordinator
neal.caidin at apereo.org
Skype: nealkdin
Twitter: ncaidin









-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/cle-release-team/attachments/20130822/bb414088/attachment-0001.html