linaro-project-management team mailing list archive

[David Zinman <david.zinman@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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=0AjEaTwrvj1bidDFtQzdqcXQ4ZjFuS3JSTUZIRGlHcUE



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