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
- Release Tasks
- Create base ticket with the following tasks
- Branch and pull request for updating the ACS release version
- 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.
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