Postmortem and lessons learned for Linaro's release 2012.04
https://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1204/Release/Review
Highlights and Key Successes ============================ The Linaro 12.04 delivery included ARM Fast Models a platform which assists programmers by giving them a virtual environment to develop software for unreleased silicon.
The migration to Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) by the Ubuntu Developer Platform team was delivered and built for armhf. Linaro U-boot is now based on the upstream release v2012.04.1. Support for big.LITTLE integrated switcher continues to be added to deliverables.
The Snowball board has been enabled with multimedia support by the Android team. The team is also supporting big.LITTLE testing and development.
Postmortem and Lessons Learned ==============================
The unavailability of the LAVA lab was a perpetual handicap throughout the cycle. Consequences of the inaccessible lab include inconsistent testing of the images, possible missed issues, and the reduced quantity and quality of deliverables. Jenkins scripting has also been unstable for this cycle adding to the unpredictability of the release.
However, even with these problems, the engineers pulled together and exhibited some great teamwork and effort in order to release on time. Particular acknowledgement goes to Fathi, Paul L., Abhishek, Botao, Ricardo, Andy D., Deepti, and Georgy.
Some of the teams are dealing with staffing issues with the departures of a few members, and new people coming on board. Some teams have reduced resources.
An issue that some teams have drawn attention to is the opaqueness of the TSC and roadmap process. Some roadmap processes are requested of teams with little notice for delivery, and without good communication of the deliverable.
Some lessons learned from the cycle are: * Need a staging area with the same setup as production * This would mitigate the risk of an essential build service like LAVA and Jenkins going down * Can be deployed to production, staging and personal environments. * Validation server has a ton of data that is not duplicated in personal environments. It is important to be able to work from a backup copy * Blueprints should be updated on a weekly basis and given particular attention at the beginning of the cycle. * When IS issues happen, use the IS stakeholders: Joey, Danilo, Fathi.
Platform Blueprints ---------------------------- The number of blueprints that missed the cycle: Android 22 out of 35 Developer Platform 12 out of 22 Infrastructure 5 out of 10 Lava 7 out of 11
Total: 46 out of 78 59% if blueprints scheduled for this cycle were not delivered. * Not included is data from working groups and landing teams
Source: https://docs.google.com/a/linaro.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjEaTwrvj1bidDFtQz...
-- David Zinman Linaro Release Manager | Project Manager Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs