2.2 Release Planning 5-23-06
May 23, 2006 2.2 Release planning meeting
Attendees
Lance Speelmon
Peter Knoop
John Leasia
Chris Coppola
Chris Maurer
Clay Fenlason
Seth Theriault
Megan May
Please feel free to edit these notes
Discussion Points
OSP-start up problems - John Ellis resolved this last night. Stephan has confirmed they are able to build.
Differences in group awareness between tools.
GB will not be able to resolve this easily. It seems that the best course of action is to alter assignments.
there are other permission issues with assignments and schedule that should have been checked in
Please see SAK-5016 and SAK-5030 for more details.
Proposal for assignments/GB issues is:
Because the GBook does not calculate grades properly for group particular Assignments, we need to add some configurations to sakai.properties that will allow institutions to decide how to deploy group awareness in Assignments and the interaction with GBook. An institution may want to prevent just group particular assignments from going to gradebook, or prevent group assignments in general (but let assignments to everyone go to gradebook).
use to allow group awareness option in assignments. By default this is true and # the Display to Site/Display to selected groups' radio buttons appear. If false, # the two radio buttons do not appear (and all assignments are therefore to # everyone) allow.group.assignments=true
use to hide or show the Assignments 'Add to Gradebook' option for group # particular assignments. IF an assignment is directed to a # particular group or group(s), the default is that the assignment can't then # also be added to Gradebook. If 'Display to site' is selected rather than 'Display # to selected groups', then the 'Add to Gradebook' option does appear allow.group.assignments.in.gbook=false
So, for example, To allow group assignments into gbook
allow.group.assignments=true
allow.group.assignments.in.gbook=true
To allow non-group assignments only in gbook (default)
allow.group.assignments=true allow.group.assignments.in.gbook=false
To disable group assignments entirely
allow.group.assignments=false
Comment from Glenn:I'm working on group awareness, and will be working with Zhen / Joanne / Jim to get this done right.
SAK-4598: OSP / Problems when saving forms using the helper. OSP is dead in the water without this functionality
Sooner there is a resolution to this the better as adaquete testing needs to occur.
OSP dev team believes this is a problem that Jim needs to address. Lance will call Jim after this meeting to see if we can get movement on this issue
Provisional tools will come 2nd to those that are not
Samigo - currently it isn't functional. Megan had spoken w/Daisy the previous day and believes they are working on a fix.
Lance will follow up with Lydia
Resources - concerned that group awareness isn't developed yet, there are a lot of bugs. This is a tool
John reports that he believes Jim has a plan for implementing group awareness in resources.
Roster - doesn't work; produces an error upon access
IU needs to look into this
this tool is still provisional
QA Timeline - any chance that the date could slip?
There is a big difference between June 15th release and July 1st release. Would like to see something really stable. Local implementation typically needs to occur by Aug 1.
Again, people are concerned about the number of cycles that we'll get in as the current cycle is a touch less than 5 weeks and there are a number of large problems
Lance believes that a summer release should be done by the beginning of the summer (ie month ago). Code in May, rather in june. Everyone seemed in agreement about this
Seth speculates that we shouldn't have a maintenance release during summer as too many people will be focused on local issues. Last summer the maintenance release got minimal QA,. Perhaps a maint release over the summer may not be a formal activity?
It's too early to make a decision to slip the timeline. We should organize a BOF session in vancouver to review this. Should it be open to all? It was decided to make it open to all for attendence but that we'll need ensure that the conversation stays on track. We need key players there - Glenn, Chuck, Lance, Jim, Samigo reps, OSP reps, GB reps. Will see about coordinating this with the group awareness BOF as many of the attendees are similar (however, we do not want to combine these as they are two very different discussions)
EID
Lance was suprised to see this would be optional. For consistancy's sake, it shouldn't be optional as fragmenting the low level data model will give implementations differences that aren't nessecary.
No one saw a reason that an institution wouldn't want to do this given there is a converation script
Given the concensus of the stakeholders represented here, Lance will carry this forward to Chuck and Glenn.
Comment from Glenn: No, it is not intended to be optional. It was just being phased in over the testing period. It's in now.
Converstion scripts
What's the status on these? 2.1.2 --> 2.2 as well as the EID one
Comment from Glenn: I seem to be doing this. I have notes. Hope to get them into some sort of runable shape this week, but that's not looking good.
Next Tag
Given the conference and holiday next week, when should the next tag be cut?
It was suggested that is be done Friday or Thursday night.
What about fixes occuring over the weekend- perhaps we should wait. Some institutions might have trouble getting a build up early next week. We should go with what's there and if we need to cut a new tag early next week, we do it.
Needs to be done before 11 am so S. Africa & UK will be able to bring the build up.
the time will be determined by the responses Lance receives from Glenn, Jim, and Lydia
Misc
Will people have assurance that they can use 2.2 or will they need to force them to go to the maint? Only time will tell
What is the high level strategy for moving Samigo into provisional status? (ie publicity) Not sure on this one - Seth and Lance with both check with Chuck on this.
Action item
Megan: Contact Stephan to update qa1-UZ instance to trunk.
Lance: Contact Jim Eng re: group awareness and SAK-4598
Lance: Contact Lydia Li re: Samigo
Lance: Contact Glen re: converstion scripts, EID issue,
Peter: Will set up BOF to discuss release next week
John: Will created JIRA for proposed solution to assignments/group awareness
Emailed Comment from Charles Severance
Folks - In an ideal world (with a conversion script) this seems like a simple choice.
The problem here is that the conversion script for eid would be the most complex conversion we have ever done - it will require opening up XML blobs one by one and fixing them and then rewriting them. And we have to peer into every nook and cranny of Sakai's tables and get it right. I worry that we will miss tables and end up issuing little "conversion patches" over the summer.
The fact that we might have 10 or so really embarrasing JIRAs in 2.2 after the release also bothers me but we can fix code bugs in maintenance releases - I am more worried about conversion bugs that pop up after the release. Then folks who come to 2.2 in later will have to run 2-3 separate conversion scripts in the right order because we will never go back and re-test everything as a whole once the lead institutions are up on 2.2.
This is something that should have probably two weeks of QA on the conversion script - we need a number of production sites to run the script in test environments to make sure that it really works and then carefully QA the systems after the conversion is done.
The conversion script could easily take a week to get a nice clean first version and then we need 1-2 weeks of QA of the script. That moves us into a July release by my calculation if the worst case scenario turns out to be true.
Wishing that this was easier or already done does not help.
We will have to make a hard choice as to whether we do this and try to do it for this release. I completely understand that it is desirable. But is it 2-week slip desirable? I think that the community would prefer to keep this an optional feature and not slip the release any more than already necessary.
I am quite sure that I am being Chicken Little here - but with Hibernate 3 during integration week, Group Awareness still limping in and OSP startup chewing up a week or so of our collective attention, we are already on track to slip at least week already. Holding the release for the conversion script and associated testing could push it to 2 or even three weeks if things do not go well.
Sorry to be the wet blanket here.
But the good news is that we will have more time to test the winning
2.2 skin
/Chuck