ICT ALMA Common Software

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ALMA

New release every two months

The delivery life-cycle of ALMA has scheduled releases for COMMON (ACS + ARCHIVE + ICD) every two months, which means that new releases of ACS follow the same schedule. The releases are of the form COMMON-<YYYYMMM> (For instance COMMON-2019JUN). Each of these releases consist in several tasks besides the actual implementation of the features/improvements/bug-fixes. These tasks are:

  • Planning
    • Planning for the release
  • Release Tasks
    • Create base ticket with the following tasks
    • Branch and pull request for updating the ACS release version
    • Integration branch creation
    • Confluence page for the release notes
    • Create Jenkins (or the build system in use) jobs for the release
      • ExtProds building job
      • ACS building job
      • ACS testing job
      • ACS Pre-release/Release job
  • Implementation
    • Actual implementation of the tickets and tasks within the release schedule (Release Planning)
  • Integration
    • Create integration branch for the release 'integration/COMMON-YYYYMMM'
    • Merge pull-requests into the integration branch
    • Prepare a build of the release
    • Execute tests for the release
  • Publishing
    • Prepare one or more pre-releases during the two months period.
      • The last of them should include all the changes and be prepared at the end of the implementation phase as described in the release schedule (Release Planning)
      • If there are issues with the pre-release a new one must be prepared after bug-fixing any pending issue
    • Prepare the final release after the verification phase has finished according to release schedule (Release Planning)
      • Additional releases may be produced if there were issues with the release
  • Reporting
    • Send a memorandum at the beginning of each month reporting the work done during the previous month
      • There's two memorandums per release

Some releases may require additional care, like a special long-lived branch or additional Jenkins jobs, pre-releases, etc. An example of this is for the Java 11 upgrade. In the worst case scenario, this may imply repeating almost all the tasks for the special deliverable.

ACS Community

Quarterly meetings with ACS community

A meeting with ACS community should be organized every quarter. The tasks for these meetings are the following:

  • Check action items from previous meetings and gather information about its current status
  • Prepare an initial agenda for the meeting
  • Prepare a doodle poll at least two weeks in advance
  • Send an e-mail for the people to participate in the poll and requesting for additional topics
  • Set up a videocon/telecon conference for the meeting
  • Take notes and prepare the minute of the meeting, including a set of action items
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