2025-02-17 BTR Meeting Minutes

Follow-up Last Meeting

@Maria Grimaldi

• Sumac Retrospective Feedback - closed on Feb 17

• Redwood Retrospective Action Items - follow ups

• Sumac.2 Release (Feb 12, 2025). What to do with enterprise security backports?

  • Farhaan will notify maintainers early about security patches so they have enough time to review PRs. The last patches felt rushed, so this should help make the process smoother. Reviewing these PRs shouldn't take long.

• Teak Release Planning (Feb 06). Any concern? What about the 2 month testing window?

  • The release date is still being discussed, so we’re not sure how long the testing window will be.

• High-priority bugs: Build-Test-Release Working Group • openedx

Release Testing Integration with Documentation Proposal

@John Swope

Propose a pilot for testing new releases based on the docs that exist in docs.openedx.org.

• In initial Pilot, align some of the release testing line items with existing docs.

• Benefit: give contributors clearer testing process.

• Benefit: Uncovers documentation in need of updates/fixes.

Retrospective Items

• Sumac.1 Retrospective 🌳⏪

Better Coordination and Planning with 2U

• How can we better coordinate with 2U to avoid delays like the one that happened with Forum V2?

• What improvements can we make in planning to ensure features are included on time? (e.g., Forum V2, Tutor-Indigo dark theme).

Forum V2 Stability

• Investigate what Peter means when he says that Forum V2 is "not stable enough."

• What actions can we take to improve its stability for Teak?

Participation in the Testing Process

• Communicate in community channels that testing can be done by anyone, technical or non-technical, emphasizing the importance of community participation.

• Leverage the documentation pilot to include non-technical people by providing detailed guides, reducing the participation gap.

• Reach out to other working groups before testing to encourage their participation.

• Promote testing as part of core contributor work.

• Encourage organizations actively participating in BTR to reach out internally and invite people to participate, emphasizing the importance of reserving capacity for this.

Bug Management and Resolution

• Bug triagers should proactively leave comments for maintainers when opening an issue, informing them that the issue comes from the release testing process, stating its priority, and explaining its impact on the release. This will help maintainers take appropriate action.

• Increase visibility for maintainers on the issue board with all relevant information. To achieve this, we should review the board and optimize its usability to make it easier to understand and use.

• Should we update maintainers’ responsibilities to explicitly include support for release testing, or would that be too much?

• Plan what we want to resolve for each release by milestones:

  • Start this exercise with sumac.3 to focus efforts on resolving issues and preventing backlog accumulation for teak.1.

  • Learn from this process and apply it to the next releases.

  • Prioritize which issues to resolve together with the Product WG after categorizing them into bugs, regressions, and blockers.

• Farhaan offered to find help for reviewing MFE PRs.

Backports and Process Automation

• Currently, the release manager is usually tagged manually in PRs by the PR author. Can we automate this with the help of a bot?

• Farhaan mentioned an initiative focused on improving these processes, and we could get involved in it.

Teak Release (postponed for next meeting)

• What can we do to prepare for the Teak cut?

  • Testing process

  • New features testing

  • Release management

  • Release documentation

  • Debugging