[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Release Manager Proposal for 2.7

[Ben Shum]

Hi all,

I volunteered to act as release manager for the next Evergreen version
(proposed 2.7) and received general confirmation for the role by
participants at the developer meeting held on March 21, 2014 at the
Evergreen conference.  There will be a formal vote in IRC at the next
online developer meeting.

As discussed during that meeting, the following is a short list of
general objectives/ideas intended for our next development cycle:

1)  Highlight new features under development for feedback during
dedicated time at our monthly developer meetings.  This is intended to
give more direct feedback for new development which may impact large
areas of Evergreen and bring it to the attention of the whole group.
It continues to be a strong recommendation for any developer to
announce new development work early via Launchpad, lists, etc. for
greater community review and feedback.

2)  Engage community participation for official "bug wrangling /
fixing days" where we focus on identifying and fixing bugs affecting
many members as noted in Evergreen's Launchpad bug tracker.  These
would likely precede official deadlines for releases to give time to
incorporate any work in the various milestones.  Dates to be
determined.

3)  Review our internationalization/translation processes and work to
involve and support new groups interested in translating the different
parts of Evergreen.  The development team is still looking for an
interested person to take on a role of Translation Manager, but in the
meantime, extra attention will be given during this release cycle to
groups or individuals interested to participate in Evergreen
translation efforts.

4)  Deprecate and remove old code that is no longer necessary or
broken.  As one immediate example: the old style circulation scripts
have been officially deprecated since version 2.4 in favor of
in-database circulation policies and we should remove the circ scripts
completely from the code base along with any other unnecessary pieces.

5)  Along the way, there will be announcements made with regards to
the web-based staff client development.  In particular, it was decided
among developers that specific modules within the staff client will be
announced as feature frozen while work for the web-based rewrite is
done for those modules to achieve feature parity with existing
capabilities.  This will mean that throughout the development cycle,
there will be times when all developers will be asked to refrain from
adding new features to the existing staff client for specified
modules.  There will be some discussion between the developers to
decide all these dates in advance and they will be announced soon.

As for general timeline, I believe that Dan Wells has laid out a great
framework for us to follow during his time as release manager.  Some
potential dates to get started thinking about (I decided I like
Thursdays, so I've selected the major Thursdays with some minor
adjustment for major US/Canadian holidays):

June 5 -- target main features for initial 2.7 milestone review
July 10 -- 2.7 alpha
August 7 -- 2.7 beta
September 4 - 2.7 RC
September 18 - 2.7.0 Final

There will be more dates to be included and I plan to update the
Evergreen calendar to reflect these events, along with the dedicated
bug days and module freezes for web-client development.

I look forward to working with everyone -- developers, reviewers, and
users alike.  My desire is to provide good feedback on Evergreen's
ongoing development efforts to our whole community as we move into
this next phase of work.  Please feel free to respond to this email
with any questions or concerns regarding the plan as I have outlined.
This is just our first draft plans and there is still room for
discussion and review.

-- Ben

-- 
Benjamin Shum
Evergreen Systems Manager
Bibliomation, Inc.
24 Wooster Ave.
Waterbury, CT 06708
203-577-4070, ext. 113