1. Writing Release Notes

Note: While the writer is writing the release notes, another member of the team tests the context-sensitive links in Studio and the LMS. For more information, see the following pages.

Testing Studio Context-Sensitive Help

Testing LMS Context-Sensitive Help


The process for creating or updating release notes is the process outlined on the 
Creating and Updating Documentation - RTD page, with the additional steps outlined below. 

Note: The source files for edX release notes are in the edx-documentation/en-us/release_notes folder.

  1. Review the list of commits that are in the week's releases and works with the product team to determine which items are mentioned, and the descriptive text for each item.
  2. Create a branch in the edx-documentation repo, e.g. "RN_WeekEndFeb3" for easy identification.
  3. On this branch, create the rst source files for the release notes as follows:
    1. Identify what components are affected. For example, studio, lms, analytics, documentation.
    2. In the release_notes/2017 folder, in the appropriate component subfolders (create one if it doesn't yet exist), add a dated file where you'll write the item descriptions. For example, if there is a Studio item and an Analytics item, create studio_2017-02-03.rst under the "studio" subfolder and analytics_2017-02-03.rst under the "analytics" subfolder.
    3. In the release_notes/source/ folder, update the index file for each affected component. For example, update studio_index.rst with a title "Week ending 3 Feb 2017" and an "include" directive to the file you created in step b.
    4. In the release_notes/source/2017 folder, add a summary file for that week's releases, named for the release date (usually the Friday). For example, 2017/2017-02-03.rst. In this date summary file, add a title (e.g. "Studio" or "Analytics") and an "include" directive to each file you created in step b.
    5. In the 2017 folder, update the index.rst with an entry for the summary file you just created. Note that these lines are filenames, not dates.
  4. Commit your changes to your branch.
  5. On GitHub, create a pull request and tag reviewers. (Going to the repo in Github.com and creating the pull request there gets you the proper PR template).
  6. Development, Product, PM, and Training teams review and revise the release notes, making sure that the included features and changes are described accurately and positioned appropriately.
  7. Make revisions as necessary. Before merging the PR, squash commits.
  8. Merge the pull request.
  9. Build the release notes project on RTD.
  10. Update the release date on the docs.edx.org page.