We are currently working on the release of RAFT II. This checklist tracks is the current release path of RAFT updates to the customer-support and production-operations areas of IS&T.
Initiation
- Points of contact and release team defined in Roster.
- Training teams from IS&t and COEUS engaged; Training Plan.
- Critical Path: Need stable test environment.
- Usability team engaged; Usability & Accessibility.
- Stakeholder committee schedule in place, core business users signed up for rolling usability-test plan.
Planning
- Enter release date, and other significant dates, on Change Communications Calendar.
- Are hard dates (i.e. less than two weeks slippage) ready?
- Planned major milestones recorded on wiki home page.
- Consider how to support early adopters or pilot users, phase out current version?
- Pilot release in May, community release in June. Still no hard transition plan for RAFT I users?
- Internal IS&T internal architecture-review team formed. Six-week code burn-in period required between code-completion and go-live.
- Code management/versioning and continuous integration plan with release engineer. Deploy from Bamboo or directly from SVN.
- Awaiting stable test release to raft-test for system operators to review the install.
- Review need to de-support of previous version(s), communications to current users.
- Create communication plan, based on stakeholders identified in prior steps.
- Create smoke-test plan with business-support team. Due before June go-live.
Executing
- Provision systems, VMs, based on initial architecture plan.
- New raft-test and raft-prod systems in place. To replace existing RAFT I servers.
- Await decision on budget for online help systems. bi-help-dev installed on temporary system so documenation staff can begin work.
- Update datacenter SLAs with technical, financial, business contact information.
- Developing blanket SLA between business-support and Business Intelligence team.
- Draft in progress.
- Training curriculum, work with Training to ramp-up Help Desk (business-support).
- Stakeholder engagement: Trying to move design documents to wiki for better collaboration, resources limited.
- Develop RAFT escalation scripts from Tier 2 (business-support) and Tier 3 (raft-support).
- Phased usability test plan underway with phased rollout of RAFT functionality (Agile?)
Monitor and Control
- If actual dates do not match previously expected dates, update calendar.
- business-help and business-intelligence teams to perform smoke tests for every patch or update during burn-in period.
- 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.
- Release (Send announcement, deploy final production release, etc.)
- Second architecture review required, same reviewers, after May pilot release.
- Revise smoke tests and escalations as needed.
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
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.
Open Questions
- 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.