Fwd: Scope and Timeline for Puppet Platform 5.4.0

[Eric Sorenson]

Hi puppet-dev - Sorry for the relative quiet on the release front. We took an end-of-year break from the monthly platform releases in order to spend time on release process improvements and automation (yes, even at Puppet there is always more manual work to eliminate :)

I wanted to forward this message along to let you know what's happening next - tl;dr we're shooting for a "y" release of the platform, Puppet 5.4.0,  in mid-Februrary. 

Kenn, our project manager extraordinaire, lays out the timeline below, and in general we are re-instituting the practice of including the puppet-dev list in mails like this that describe date/scope changes for the releases. We're also keeping the release date fields in JIRA up to date, so you can see what's coming up on the "Releases" page of the puppet (PUP) and puppet-agent (PA) projects, like this: https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/projects/PA?selectedItem=com.atlassian.jira.jira-projects-plugin:release-page

--eric0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kenn Hussey <ke...@puppet.com>
Date: Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 9:32 AM
Subject: Re: Scope and Timeline for Puppet Platform 5.4.0

On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 4:43 PM, Kenn Hussey <ke...@puppet.com> wrote:

We have decided to defer the next monthly release of the Puppet Platform so that teams can double down on release efficiency improvements through December (and focus on shipping the next round of Z releases in January). See below for updated milestone dates.

On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 12:59 PM, Kenn Hussey <ke...@puppet.com> wrote:

Team,

Now that Puppet Platform 5.3.3 has shipped (woohoo), I’d like to draw your attention to our next monthly release of the Puppet Platform, 5.4.0.

Scope

The scope for this release includes features, improvements, and bug fixes. Given our unified branching strategy, code for this release should land on ‘master’ branches (and corresponding component branches) in git.

Timeline

This release would have normally been scheduled around the middle of November, but we decided to defer it by a month and devote the cycles that would have been spent shipping it on making improvements to release processes and tooling.

Starting this release, we will no longer be tracking a formal “Ready for Hardening” milestone, as it isn’t as relevant now that we’re striving for more of a continuous delivery (“always shippable”) approach to development.

However, now that we’ve shipped supported releases containing translations, we need to work to minimize changes that impact strings towards the end of the release cycle. As such, I’ve added a new “String Freeze” milestone on December 6, which is the time by which a changes affecting translatable strings must be complete (so that we have time to request, obtain, and merge translations before we ship).

The "String Freeze" milestone for Puppet Platform 5.4.0 will now be January 31.

 

The Stop Ship Line, by which time all planned code changes must be complete, is targeted for December 13.

Stop Ship will be February 7.

 

This means that all work for the release needs to be planned during the next five weeks, with the goal of shipping the release on December 19.

The new release date will be Wednesday, February 21. (It's not on Tuesday because that Monday is a holiday in the US and it's not February 13 because that's during FY19 Kickoff week.)

Now that a company-wide FY19 Kickoff isn't happening the week of February 12, we will retarget this release to what would have been its logical release date, February 13. Milestone dates in JIRA and Confluence have been updated accordingly.

  

If you have any questions or concerns about any of this, please let me know.

Thanks,

Kenn