2024-05-20 BTR Meeting Minutes

 Date

May 20, 2024

 Participants

• @Maksim Sokolskiy

• @Adolfo Brandes

• @Maria Grimaldi

• @Jenna Makowski

• @Peter Pinch

• @Régis Behmo

• @Dawoud Sheraz

• @Sarina Canelake

🎥 Recording

• Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

🤖 AI-Generated Meeting Summary (Unedited)

Quick recap

The team discussed the progress of the redwood release process, focusing on testing, and agreed to find a solution for restoring the leaderboard and managing user comments. They also addressed issues related to the sandbox reset, long npm install steps, and release management, with a focus on decreasing downtime and improving the process. Lastly, they deliberated on managing and prioritizing issues, releasing a security fix to the Edx Platform, and changes to the footer component in their project.

Summary

• Redwood Release Process and Testing Adjustments
  The team, led by Adolfo, discussed the progress of the redwood release process, focusing on the testing phase. Maria presented the testing process, and Peter identified a missing element, the leaderboard. Jenna suggested removing the dropdown for the 'assigned to' column to allow for more flexibility in adding testers. However, Peter was determined to restore the leaderboard. The team agreed to figure out a solution, with Peter taking the lead on this issue. Maria also suggested updating column H in the test sheet.

• Addressing Comment Posting and Bug Reporting
  Maria raised a concern about users posting comments in the wrong column (Column O), leading to a suggestion from Peter to move comments into Column O and tag the commenter in the hope this would influence their behavior. Jenna proposed splitting Column O into two columns, one for Github issues and one for comments, to simplify the process. After some discussion, Peter agreed to try this approach. Additionally, Adolfo and Peter discussed the definition of a bug and the process for reporting them, with Peter agreeing to review comments and direct users to open a bug if they believe something is amiss.

• Sandbox Reset Frequency and Visibility
  Maria, Adolfo, Peter, Max, Régis, and Syed discussed the issues related to the sandbox resetting every Monday and the impact on testing. They decided to make this information more visible, possibly on the 'Getting Started' tab or the Confluence page, to inform new testers and team members about the regular reset. The team also agreed to update the sandbox update frequency to every Monday at 7 AM UTC in the relevant documentation. The need for these changes was identified as a way to prevent confusion and delays in testing due to the sandbox reset.

• Reducing Downtime in NPM-Driven Builds
  The team discussed ways to decrease downtime caused by long npm install steps and build failures. Ideas included increasing parallelism, building images asynchronously, and implementing a custom NPM registry. However, concerns were raised about potential system crashes and degraded performance. The team agreed to continue exploring potential solutions and to prioritize this issue for future development.

• Experimentation, Release Management, and Documentation
  Maria, Régis, and Max emphasized the importance of experimentation in finding solutions. Max provided updates on release management and mentioned ongoing work for Quince. There was discussion on the status of released documentation, with Matt's absence noted. The team also discussed new flags from Quince to Redwood and the manual process of preview release processes. Jenna shared plans to populate product release notes on the wiki over the coming week, with Peter clarifying that there will be two sets of release notes. Sarina revealed plans to move release notes from the wiki to the docs. Lastly, Maria reported on testing progress and requested assistance with an email configuration issue.

• Managing and Prioritizing Work-Related Issues
  Maria and Adolfo led a discussion on managing and prioritizing issues related to their work. Maria explained her current strategy for identifying and testing issues before involving the team. The team agreed to use the existing test report template for now and consider adding a 'core product' column to help guide their work. Jenna proposed pulling core product capabilities into a separate column to help identify high priority issues, while Adolfo questioned the origin and criteria of the 'priority' column. The team decided to retain the 'priority' column for now and explore the new approach suggested by Jenna. Sarina emphasized the nuanced decision-making around release blockers, and Adolfo proposed using release blocker labels to indicate priority. Chelsea suggested a two-level prioritization system, and Maria agreed to add a new column aligning with the product core to the test sheet. The team also recommended getting the spreadsheet status into Github.

• Edx Platform Security Fix Release Options
  Max proposed two options for releasing a security fix to the Edx Platform: a full cycle with a subsequent tutorial downstream release or a simple patch with an additional tutorial. Max and Régis agreed to patch the build, with the action item assigned to Régis. Maria asked for documentation of the process, which Max said was already documented but might need to be reemphasized. Adolfo planned to start a thread about Btr or Redwood release planning, and Peter expressed his willingness to discuss the matter further.

• Footer Component Customization and Backporting
  Peter and Adolfo discussed changes to the footer component in their project. Adolfo explained that instead of forking the footer to customize it, they could use a new repository called 'front end slot' and a footer slot. This method would continue to work, but without the need for forking. They also discussed the possibility of creating a plugin to further customize the footer. Moreover, Peter expressed his intention to comment on an ongoing discussion about customization. Towards the end, Maria was asked to open an issue regarding backporting changes, and Adolfo indicated his plan to start a thread on Slack about this.

This summary captures the essence of the discussion, the participants involved, and the decisions made during the BTR meetup but does not intend to be as accurate as a transcript.

 Discussion topics

 Decisions