On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 12:22:45AM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
With 0.92.0 now in the rear-view mirror (amazingly!) it's a good time to look at places we could improve.
By now, we've done so many releases we have the release process down to a bit of a science, and we have ample checklists and todo lists. We know quite precisely what needs to be done and when. But where we ran ran into trouble was getting those tasks assigned out and completed on schedule. Thankfully, everything ended up getting done - kudos to everyone that stepped up and pitched in! But far too often they got done only after deadlines had passed; in some cases this caused schedule targets to get postponed, in other cases it caused impacts elsewhere such as translation. Mainly I blame myself - ultimately these are all failures in performing good release management. But some how or other we need to tighten all of this up if we are going to get releases out in a more timely fashion. Does anyone have suggestions or observations that could help us improve this?
Oops, despite the wall of text I forgot to mention an important part:
Somehow we forgot to write the release announcement. I ended up throwing something together last minute (post-release). I think it was pretty good but honestly it should have been written weeks ago. As it was, we were left with inadequate time to get it translated, and it's been impacting website updates. Again - mainly my own fault for letting it slip through! But going forward I think we really need to ensure we assemble a team of writers to draft the various announcement texts we need ahead of time, to ensure translators and web maintainers have adequate time to process.
Maren also pointed out that the final part of the release schedule ended seemed rather nebulous. It can be hard to nail down exact times and dates for a release when changes are still coming in at the last minute, but the final steps of the release need to happen swiftly and so need to be coordinated so they can happen in good synchronicity, and that requires a clearly defined schedule and a commitment to get each bit done predictably and on time. Definitely an area to improve on next time. Accept my apologies if the suddenness of the release caused problems for you; I will try and make it be less surprising next time through.
Finally let me say, "Great work!" Because at the end of the day we've done it - put out a solid release with some awesome features and a good deal of attention to QA. A common theme I'm seeing in comments is the huge positive impact Inkscape has made in people's lives and careers, and the 0.92 release you've created is going to enable a lot of people to do some really great things.
Bryce
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