2.5 Release Planning-15 (20080109)

Attendees

  • Megan May
  • Peter Knoop
  • Steve Githens
  • John Norman
  • Ian Boston
  • James Logan
  • Renu
  • Clay Fenlason
  • David Haines
  • Jim Eng
  • Seth Theriault

Meeting Agenda

  • JSR-170 in 2.5
  • FCK 2.5.1
  • Future Meetings
  • Status of Release
    • Next tag
    • 2.5 Dashboard Review
    • JIRA Bug verification goal:  On Dec 19th we had 491 resolved JIRA bugs that are awaiting verification  ~52%  (538/1059). On 1/3 , we have 440 resolved JIRA bugs that are awaiting verification ~68% (737/1079) 
    • Areas to focus on
  • Updates from Developers and Testers (all)

Meeting Notes


JSR-170 in 2.5

There was a lot of healthy discussion about implementing this. Seth began by elaborating on why he choose to voice some concern. 
Seth - the technical parts are going in are fine and he has a lot of confidence in Ian, John and others at CARET. Willing to bend the rules for the greater good but his main objective is getting people to talk about the options. Pointed out that John Norman created a confluence page explaining on the different options which was very helpful. This kind of documentation helps facilitate discussions lay out the options clearly and in a manner easily understood.  These changes have significant merit and if we bend from our rules, he wants to see that changes are made that address some of our release process problems. This shouldn't be an exception that becomes a precedent.
John Norman - Reasonable point of view.   Idea that we might have a 2.6 after 2.5 achieves most of the goals.  When you look at it like that- are we better off or not?  
David Haines - suggest there is a different problem.  putting this code in there helps make it easily available for testing which is distinctly different that putting in code that has been tested and is production ready.  Had questions on why this could be put in contrib and pulled down by those will to experiment with this.  Providing early testing at CARET in a production environment would be helpful. This is a major component of the software so it differs greatly than smaller changes that have been proposed in the past.
Clay:   Georgia Tech would make an attempt. Might run it with the new email archive tool.  Exercise it along side. 
Ian Boston  -JCR . . 200 lines of java code and jackrabbit (better quality than in Sakai; running in other production implementations successful).  If work was to be done in contrib and factored into branches that is going to take a great deal of his time.  Willing to do this, but must realize that he won't be working on much else.  Is that acceptable?
Seth - Don't agree with the process. and needs to address them. 
John Norman -  wants to see improvements in the release process.. which is a slightly different issue.  This is an exceptional situation and shouldn't be seen as a precedent.  Also reminded folks that initially we were going to do a release in Dec. Pushing the timeline out should play into

 Summary:   The technical merits of the proposal to merge in JSR-170 into 2.5.x were not a factor in the concerns that were raised.  Much of the discussion rose around violating our current processes (ie breaking code freeze) and the desire that changes to this process should be made in the future.  Given that the there is strong support from the development team, test plans to ensure that adverse effects are not felt, community willingness to assume the risk, community support to exercise the (experimental) code in production, and that this leverages our resources is the best way possible, that the recommendation is that these changes should be merged into 2.5.x after the beta2 tag has been cut. Rest assured, release process refinement will occur.


FCK 2.5.1 (SAK-12542)

Josh Ryan is 1/2 way through implementing the latest version of FCKeditor and wanted its inclusion in 2.5 considered.   There are a few good benefits, such as support for the new version of Safari (finally) and a boat load of bug fixes that could potentially resolve some or out standing issues.

Comments on this was solicited - Seth pointed out that this was another exception to the code freeze.    


Future Meetings 
We're going to move to meeting at 10am on Thursdays so that the folks from capetown can attend. While this does leave out other geographical areas, it will mean that those already running 2.5 in production as well as handling the branch management can attend. Each release a new time will be determined.


Status of Release

  • Next tag - is going to be cut shortly.  Changes to unstealth the tools in trunk need to be made as well.  The tag should be ready later today.  We'll make this one and then let Ian work on merging in the JSR-170 stuff - this will prevent us from being hung up in the event that there  are any problems after the merge.
  • 2.5 Dashboard Review
    • There were a few outstanding blockers, one of them help documentation, the other relating the WYSIWYG.  The third is search
    • >15 critical issues that are being worked on
    • Ian made a point to stress that we are continually going to find new bugs (even ones that are blocker/critical level (smile) ) so it's important for us all to remember this.
  • Areas to focus on - There are over 70 bug fixes going in from beta to beta2.  The WG should concentration on verify this first.   James Logan asked if there was a way to determine those fixes.  Megan said that the QA WG Focal point filter would be updated to pull just these in once the tag was cut. 

Updates from Developers and Testers (all) - most people were still getting back from break and should be available for testing. 

Overview (Standing item)

Timeline Review
  • Nov 7 tag 2.5.0.012
  • Nov 22 2.5.0.beta cut
  • Nov 26 2.5.0.beta deployed to QA network
  • Dec 13 2.5.0.RC1 (Release Candidate 1)
  • Jan 21 2.5.0.RC2 (Release Candidate 2)
  • Feb 12 2.5.0 Release
Goals
  • Elimination of all outstanding Blocker and Critical bugs for 2.5
  • Acceptable Performance testing on mysql and oracle databases for Assignments, Resources, Forums, GB & T&Q. What is acceptable? At this point in time, no degradation from performance experienced in 2.4
  • High degree of verification (85%) of resolved JIRA bugs
  • Confirmed functional testing on all tools.
  • Positive feedback from sites running a tagged version of off branch.

Where we stand

Issues Reported against just 2.5

2.5.0.013

2.5.0.beta

1/4/07

2.5.0.rc1

2.5.0.rc2

Blocker

4

3

 

 

 

Critical

20

14

 

 

 

Total

24

17

 

 

 

2.5.0.beta Blockers - one documentation, two recently opened

2.5.0 Beta Critical -  There are 3 that we do not have anyone working on (SAK-10487, SAK-11798, SAK-12056).  One of those is related to performance in Forums as well as another that was unassigned. 6 reported in the  last 2 weeks.

All Outstanding tickets (just bugs, no tasks)

2.5.0.013

2.5.0.beta

2.5.0.rc1

2.5.0.rc2

Blocker

3

3

 

 

Critical

58

55

 

 

Total

61

58

 

 

Changes in 2.5.0.Beta
34 tickets - as with the .13 tag, most with Assignments

Progression

Q: How do we move from Beta? RC?
A: To make the progression from beta to release candidate, the aim is the resolution of outstanding blocker and critical bugs reported.

Q: Are we going to make the move from Beta to RC?
There are a number of critical issues reported against a 2.5 build we're not likely to get movement on due to resources being unavailable. What do we do with these problems?

Meeting Notes

Pretty concise and mostly 3rd person notes today. -Steve G

Release Status:

Waiting for a fix to get merged in for the drop box. It's the only thing keeping us from rolling the release candidate.

Will then hopefully deploy that tag to collab.sakaiproject.org and UM will performance test it. They can start as soon as they get working code.

How are things going Stephen M?
Not too bad. We don't have a very high load, so there are most likely a number of things that haven't been stressed yet. Still waiting on some of the Search stuff from Ian. Students come back at the end of February, but the medical school starts in the next week or so, which is a good amount of folks. We see up to 1500 sessions at the busiest times. In the following weeks we'll see maybe 500. We have 4 boxes.

JSR-170 in 2.5

Proposal is to put the JSR-170 code in 2.5, but turned off. Ian says it should have minimal impact, but available for those to turn on if they want to play with it. That would be in the next tag, coming up next week. There are long term quality gains to be had by including this turned off in the release. Clay and GTech will be able to do some extra work to make sure it causes no problems.

We need some way of testing that this won't have any affect(effect?) on the system when disabled. Steve G will write a unit test for it and some notes.

Documentation Update
Anthony has a good deal of the release documentation done. Can finish it off by next week.

Updates from Developers and Testers:

Linda: Performance testing on assignments proved a tremendous increase in performance. Changes moved response down from 1-9 seconds to about half a second.

Last call for call topics.
Will send out an update later today on status and items we're waiting