Entry tags:
AD&T recent activities from your dilettante Release Manager
My random OTW update post fortnightly (fortnightly!) meeting (Saturday 11pm -1:30am) – in which much was discussed and many plans were made.
We’re building up to another AO3 code drop!
*grins* While Jan/Feb was technically a slow patch with very few meetings and a chance for the ongoing 2009-2010 committee members to have a rest, this is not reflected in the material in this drop. I took advantage of the break and stopped haunting the chatrooms and keeping up to date on the chat transcripts. I also missed three meetings in a row due to technical difficulties and the need to sleep (shocking I know, anyone would think I didn't care). This left me feeling weirdly relaxed and out of the loop (in a good way) which was sort of true; I had no idea how much cool stuff was being done but I still knew when I had to do ‘things’.
Those ‘things’ are pretty variable:
We’re neck deep in testing right now, the Testing Team did a complete regression sweep of the Archive and we also have 135 issues in Release 0.7.3 of which 69 are now tested and good to go. Meep. I may kick out the one about the button that doesn’t work on one admin page but only when using IE7, we can live without it for now :p
Thank you, thank to the people who volunteered to help out with the testing. If anyone has a sudden lemming like urge to volunteer as well I can promise periods of intense excitement (and, you know, periods of tedium) and sneak previews of new features. You also get an adorable team of passionate people who get praised for breaking things. Go on, you know you want to.
We’re building up to another AO3 code drop!
*grins* While Jan/Feb was technically a slow patch with very few meetings and a chance for the ongoing 2009-2010 committee members to have a rest, this is not reflected in the material in this drop. I took advantage of the break and stopped haunting the chatrooms and keeping up to date on the chat transcripts. I also missed three meetings in a row due to technical difficulties and the need to sleep (shocking I know, anyone would think I didn't care). This left me feeling weirdly relaxed and out of the loop (in a good way) which was sort of true; I had no idea how much cool stuff was being done but I still knew when I had to do ‘things’.
Those ‘things’ are pretty variable:
- I negotiate the Release schedule with everyone involved, a highly sophisticated process where I suggest dates and people tell me how to change them, the trick is to propose them confidently in the knowledge that they will always shift. I am the irritant upon which pearls grow!
- I find out what code is incoming, when it’s expected to be on Test, how much testing time we need, and when we’d be likely to be ready to deploy it to Beta. This mostly involves hanging out and gossiping to likely suspects and trying to let as wide a group of people as possible what our plans are so they can tell me if there's a problem.
- I do a sort of high level QA of the Release, I go through the commit log, the code issues raised and the Test Archive. This is mostly a process of confirming all changes are visible to the Testing team and collating everything into a set of Release Notes. Our poor Coders have to deal with me asking baffling questions like ‘that thing you committed, the one with the note that made perfect sense, what does it *do*?’ followed by ‘does the Testing Team know that?’
- I talk to Support so that when we update Beta they will know what people are talking about when we get support requests for the new features. I need to do this more and better methinks.
- I also send out plaintive requests for volunteers to write help documents for new features ;) I get fabulous support on this, people wander into chat and say 'oooooh, they built an X, I'll write help documents for you' and make grabby hands.
We’re neck deep in testing right now, the Testing Team did a complete regression sweep of the Archive and we also have 135 issues in Release 0.7.3 of which 69 are now tested and good to go. Meep. I may kick out the one about the button that doesn’t work on one admin page but only when using IE7, we can live without it for now :p
Thank you, thank to the people who volunteered to help out with the testing. If anyone has a sudden lemming like urge to volunteer as well I can promise periods of intense excitement (and, you know, periods of tedium) and sneak previews of new features. You also get an adorable team of passionate people who get praised for breaking things. Go on, you know you want to.
