[Building Sakai] Proposal for Enhancements in Maintenance Branches

[Beth Kirschner]

The TCC has been discussing and revising a proposal to allow merging of small-scale enhancements into Sakai maintenance branches, and I wanted to bring this discussion to the wider community for comments and concerns. The current process allows only bug fixes into maintenance branches, but with major releases being delivered only once a year, and some institutions updating to major releases even less frequently, this could prevent many good and useful enhancements from reaching the wider community. Another side effect is that many of the larger institutions spend their resources and time merging these enhancements into their local builds that could be more productively spent on bug fixes and new development.

Concerns that have been previously discussed and influenced the current proposal include prioritization of bug fixes vs enhancements, QA testing, internationalization, and communication. The current proposal allows merging minor enhancements to the current maintenance branch only. Please take a look and let us know your thoughts by the end of this week (January 7th). The proposal is available at https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/bBFJB and also copied below.

Thanks!
- Beth

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Maintenance Branch Merge Policy (tentative)

Definitions:

Bug: JIRA tickets classified as BUG
Enhancement: JIRA tickets classified as anything other than BUG
Qualifications:

Candidates for merging into an active maintenance branch include:

Bug fixes may be applied to any active maintenance release branches
Small enhancements may be applied to only the most current maintenance release branch if they meet the following criteria:
The change is narrow in scope (modest changes to a single project)
The change has been reviewed and approved by tool lead for the maintenance branch
The change does not require database changes
The change has been running in production for one month minimum
The changes have to be reviewed for influence on i18n. If they have influence on i18n, they should be tested in 2 languages (country variants of same language are the same language for this counting).
The change is non-disruptive to the user experience ( I.e. changes that don't require user retraining and are unlikely to break existing customizations). Exceptions to this rule may be made if the change is configurable and is disabled by default.
Prior to merging, the change must be tested with the target maintenance branch, by the requesting institution, using a documented test plan.
The change must be preceded by a public announcement on the production and dev lists that alerts community members to the impending addition of a new feature in one or more maintenance branches. The announcement will describe the new feature, configuration options, test plans, relevant tickets, etc. When the change is committed a follow-up announcement listing the branch revision incorporating the change will be published. The information provided in such announcements will also be added to relevant release notes in Confluence and elsewhere.

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