We are working on the release of RAFT II. This is a major release. This checklist tracks is the current release path of RAFT II to the service operations, primarily from the Business Intelligence development team to Customer Support, Training, and Server & System Administration.

Change Management

• Enter release date, and other significant dates, on Change Communications Calendar.
  • Exchange resource name: IS&T: Change Communications
  • When these dates change, communicate to ist-pipeline list.
  • This has not been done in a while, dates have changed a lot.
• Planned major milestones recorded on wiki home page.
• Send announcement and change log to ist-pipeline@mit.edu, stakeholder list once release is complete.
• Update any known open issues (Jira, Request Tracker) affected by release and close.
• Search http://ist.mit.edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org and http://kb.mit.edufor any articles that would be invalidated by release and update as needed. Contact istweb@mit.edu if you are not sure how to update this documentation.
• Contact IS&T Communications for public release announcement.
  • If sending outside of IS&T, send draft release announcement to IS&T communications team at least 2 business days prior to release.
• Inform ist-pipeline@mit.edu, pipeline of release at least 1 business day prior to release

This documentation is for planning the release of RAFT PhII to the support areas of IS&T. Other parts of the project plan and implementation details that are not relevant to support teams should go elsewhere.

Checklist

Working on order of priority and chronology.

Initiation

• Define points of contact from IS&T Teams to Engage, right.
  • Contact help desk at inception to determine proper level engagement.
  • Contact training at inception to determine proper level engagement.
  • Contact Testing & QA at inception to determine proper level engagement
  • Contact User Experience at inception to determine proper level engagement
  • Contact documentation at inception to determine proper level engagement.
  • Contact key stakeholders, DLCs at inception to determine proper level engagement.
• Form release team, reserve resources.

Planning

• Enter release date, and other significant dates, on Change Communications Calendar.
• Consider how to support early adopters or pilot users, phase out current version?
  Define
  • Pilot release
  -decision, acceptance criteria.Code management/versioning and continuous integration plan with release engineer (SE Web Services)
  • in May, community release in June. Still no hard transition plan for RAFT I users?
  • Review need to de-support of previous version(s), communications to current users.
  • Create communication plan, based on stakeholders identified in prior steps.
  • Create testing plan, with QA resource if available.

  Executing

  Configuration Management

  • Critical Path: Need stable test environment!
  • Migrating from RAFT I environments to new, clean VMs for RAFT II
    • raft-test in place, needs PHP downgrade?
    • raft-r1, new raft production, does not exist yet.
    • Await decision on budget for drupal-based online help systems. bi-help-dev installed on temporary system so documenation staff can begin work
    Provision systems, VMs, based on initial architecture plan
    • .
  • Update datacenter SLAs with technical, financial, business contact information.
  • Training curriculum, work with Training to ramp-up Help Desk (business-help).
  • Form ad-hoc architecture review team. Review initial architecture.

  Monitor and Control

  • If actual dates do not match previously expected dates, update calendar.
  • Twice-weekly roundup of Jira issues, open bugs related to next sprint.
  • Continue to ad-hoc test software on all supported operating systems, whether or not there are formal QA resources (runtime, browser).
  • If sending outside of IS&T, send draft release announcement to IS&T communications team at least 2 business days prior to release.
  • Inform release-core@mit.edu, pipeline of release at least 1 business day prior to release.
  • Execute (Send announcement, post software for download, etc.)
  • Second architecture review, same reviewers.

  Closing

  • Send announcement and change log to release-core@mit.edu, stakeholder list once release is complete.
  • Update any known open issues (Jira, Request Tracker) affected by release and close.
  • Search http://ist.mit.eduand^{Image Removed} http://kb.mit.edufor^{Image Removed} any articles that would be invalidated by release and update as needed. Contact istweb@mit.edu if you are not sure how to update this documentation.

  Open Questions

  • SLAs for help desk, operational support, etc. What is acceptance?
  • Escalation paths for help desk and ops, where to documenent?
  • Documentation consolidation: bring more in line with de facto IS&T practices? Maybe not this phase.
  • Expectations for new communications plan: better stakeholder engagement.

  Notes

  We are a pilot for IS&T's product-release checklist. We used it as a base for this plan though it was developed for distributed/desktop release. Notes for Release-Core.

  Product-Release Checklist. You might not have authorizations to view the release-core wiki.

  Based on this system's criteria, RAFT is Resources: Moderate, Community Impact: Moderate, and Risk to IS&T: High.

  Release and Deployment Management

  • OLA: business-support team engagement, OLA in development: Service Levels Development
    • Developing blanket OLA between business-support and Business Intelligence team.
  • Code management/versioning and continuous integration plan with release engineer. Deploy from Bamboo or directly from SVN.

  Evaluation and Testing

  • See "evaluators" list at right. Responsible parties for internal evaluation. Must sign off. Second architecture review still required by this group.
  • Input and sign-off by Usability Team: Usability & Accessibility Reports.
    • Stakeholder committee schedule in place, core business users signed up for rolling usability-test plan.
  • BI Team to provide smoke-test/system health page for Customer Support?
    • business-help and business-intelligence teams to perform smoke tests for every patch or update during burn-in period (six week from go-live).

  Knowledge Management

  • Training Plan
    • Training mutual venture of SE Training team and COUES Training team.
    • Training curriculum, work with Training to ramp-up Help Desk (business-support).
  • Online Help: SE Training, Mark Wiklund.
    • are we still doing this?
  • Develop RAFT escalation scripts from Tier 2 (business-support) and Tier 3 (raft-support). Support Escalations Outline