Redwood.1 Retrospective 🌳⏪

I. Context, data, and highlights 🏅

The Product Working Group was closely involved in the process and led the implementation of several changes to it (Redwood Release Testing Strategy ), including:
- Monthly meeting to track new features and initiatives to be included in Redwood (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tWgp9LXNg4sfWYd_0ghNl6qfIZZ9851MtGBXPeSgzFs )
- The Product Core Working Group should take ownership of a “master” test spreadsheet of new features
- Maintainers are responsible for fixing bugs or getting the authors of the feature question to do so
The Redwood master branch was cut on 09/05 as planned.
The official testing period was cut in half to increase the chance of landing more new features in Redwood. For this reason, the testing process was launched on 16/05 (https://discuss.openedx.org/t/join-the-redwood-testing-team/13017 ).
Due to a last-minute security vulnerability (https://discuss.openedx.org/t/security-upcoming-security-release-for-edx-platform-on-2024-06-17/13204/3 ), Redwood was delayed a week and a half, to be successfully released on 19/06.
To target their respective audiences more specifically, the release notes were divided into https://docs.openedx.org/en/latest/community/release_notes/redwood/feature_release_notes.html and https://docs.openedx.org/en/latest/community/release_notes/redwood/dev_op_release_notes.html.

[Jenna]: Propose that we keep Product ownership of the “master” test spreadsheet, and continue to flesh out regression tests
[Jenna]: Propose that we keep the monthly meeting to track features slated for Sumac (can start again in August

[Jenna]: How can we tighten the lead time between the code cutoff and having the testing sandboxes ready? For Redwood, there was about a week in between. How can product help in defining which features should be enabled, etc?
[Jenna]: Only having 3 weeks for testing ended up feeling tight. What what would it look like to try a 6 week testing period between code cut and release, especially if we can shorten the lead time on the sandboxes?
[Jenna]: Redwood was feature-packed. How can we scale back and still have a meaningful set of capabilities/features in Sumac, without over-committing?