linaro-project-management team mailing list archive

[David Zinman <david.zinman@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings,

Here is the summary for Linaro release 11.11 postmortem and lessons learned.
For a detailed release review please visit

  https://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1111/Release/Review


Highlights and Key Successes
============================

This month's release was highlighted by the release from the Android team of
Ice Cream Sandwich images. Uploaded to youtube, the demonstration of these
images running on the Snowball platform gave Linaro some great visibility and
publicity.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQOKPLg3ARE

The Android LEB is now based off of Android 2.3.7 with a first release of
Versatile Express, using the Linaro ARM LT kernel, a NEON optimized libpng,
preliminary DS-5 support and a host of bug fixes and enhancements.

The Ubuntu LEB now officially supports the PandaBoard ES and features
PandaBoard's USB booting with U-Boot USB-SPL. Developers have access to
updated ARM DS-5 packages, and both source and debug packages for all
Linaro's kernels. Also, Firefox can now be cross-built using multi-
arch. Instructions are available from

  http://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/DevPlatform/CrossCompile/FirefoxCrossCompile.

For more information on release highlights please see our release page:

  https://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1111/Release


Postmortem and Lessons Learned
==============================

The overall sentiment from the development teams regarding this release is
positive. Even though the cycle was relatively short and included a first
week at Linaro Connect, planning went smoothly and the items delivered were
interesting and substantive.

Communication is an issue that has been re-occurring through the past few
release cycles. Platform and Landing teams have proposed a plan to facilitate
communications between the teams.

Testing is another issue that has high visibility. Testing internal
deliveries before hand off is crucial for delivering quality in the final
release and will minimize the number of times that images need to be
re-spun.

Teams are still adjusting to the monthly release cycle. Work estimating is
being fine-tuned so that the amount of effort per team per cycle is
appropriate. Progress has been made and most of the work scheduled for this
cycle was delivered, even with the addition of ICS.

There are still a couple of groups that have not entered postmortem comments
in the release review wiki page.

The issues have generated several lessons learned:
* A meeting to determine a communications plan was held and resulted in the
  following recommendations:
  * Schedule a meeting  once a month to discuss platform/landing team
    issues.
  * Schedule a weekly meeting to discuss common bugs for landing teams and
    platform teams has been scheduled.
  * On the last Friday, Monday and Tuesday of the cycle there will a stand-up
    meeting with platform and landing teams to discuss any last minute
    issues.


-- 
David Zinman
Linaro Release Manager | Project Manager
Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs