the effort of preparing the release, testing it, deploying and communicating
I believe this is exactly what we have been trying to reduce
-
preparing the release & communicating : on this topic, we move most of it to the ATAP team. Release process and communication about software changes The first experiment of it was @sauloperez proposing a very quick changelog
when he released POP : Release v2.2.2 Pop · openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork · GitHub but after that we went back to the old format of release notes. I don’t know if this was a choice or a miscommunication that we were experimenting a new format that should take less time from a dev perspective -
testing the release : thanks to the spike we see that huge tests like inventory, subs and BOM are mostly covered. This will really enable release testing to be faster. Moreover, we always spend more time on some pages if we know we have a PR covering those pages. The smaller the release, the quicker the test
As an instance with no dev on board, I’m interested in more regular releases in order to tackle two problems:
- Reduce the gap in delay between the release and the deployment - it already happened that we deployed when a new release was almost there… So when we say that we release every 2 weeks sometimes it means that we only deploy once a month… for some bugs it’s an issue…
- When we have an s1, we should be able to ship it quickly in production, without risking to have other issues merged which would prevent the release to be deployed
So I understand we don’t want patch releases, but if we don’t want patch releases, we need to increase our release/deployment frequency
On the other hand I understand that maybe we don’t have the material / resources to do 2 releases (and 2 deployments). So can we cut the pear in two (french expression) and continue trying releasing every week, but also trying to deploy as well?
Would something like regular dates work? Example:
- every Thursday, testing team is doing a release testing
- every Friday, a new release is out
- every Monday the new release gets deployed
What do you think?