Brendan Gallagher 3.24 RM proposal

I propose to be the leader in the RM position for the 3.24 release of Koha. I come with a team though and will not be handling this alone. I will be the main head and point person - so that if there are any problems or issues that all in the community can bring this up with me. I plan on dedicating 30~40 hours per week to this job (with 10~15 hours towards regular ByWater work, meetings, and responsibilities). I have talked with team members here at ByWater about the plan for this and all are on board moving forward and understand my time will be dedicated towards Release Management. (A side note in here - We really need a strong QA group - ideally it should be 6~7 people - so we need more of you to volunteer here - no matter what - even if you only QA one thing a week - it helps us all)

I feel that I can not do this job alone though and 30 hours a week alone is not nearly enough to cover all. Also I need help, so I will be relying on many others to help me accomplish this goal.

Immediate help with a “Team” layout follows:

Nicole Engard and Brendan - take care of the Administration of the job. We watch the bugs queue, develop an ever changing road map, schedule and run meetings, answer questions etc. We also do testing each week, lots and lots of testing and report weekly on our test results. Work closely with the QA team. Basically do all of the communication that is required for a full time RM. Brendan will be doing this 30 hours a week and Nicole will contribute 5~10 hours a week. Nicole and I plan on doing this portion as transparent as possible and will possible use a trello board or something so that everyone can see the management. We will continuously promote sign-off sessions and be available to help with someone signing off on code as much as possible. Most likely Nicole and I will have a meeting monday morning to plan out the week and get a schedule.

I’d also like to make myself available once a week for googlehangouts or something so that anyone in the community can ask me questions about the release coming up, bug numbers what needs to be done etc. Let’s call it the RM town hall.

Jesse Weaver (Pianohacker) and Kyle Hall - help me with the tech and will be on the QA team. They will help me push code and manage the branches just so I have some git experts close at hand. One of them will be responsible as the Jenkins manager since I will need help there. They would each do 10 hours a week on company time, and Nicole and I would have a prepared list of bugs that need to have dedicated QA time. I really need a strong technical help just to make sure that my final decisions for architecture etc are sound and are the right ones and also to help point out areas that patches code could be improved.

Also one thing is that we'd want to run with the module maintainer roles and give them the ability to push to master. They would just get a check or ok from me so that I know what’s happening and I can test everything in master.

This is really big and I wouldn’t want to do the RM unless I can get the following in place:

I would seek a training session from past RMs for me. So once I (Brendan) am elected - we'd have meetings with each past RMs to get trained and hear their thoughts. This would include a massive brain dump of all tips and advice that anyone wants to lay on us, plus a much needed help during the tenure as possible. Each and every RM is welcome to join this or have individual sessions with this team.

Some possible things that I’d like to promote

• Change the numbering to date-format for Koha instead of 3.x series. (Just a thought - of course this would be voted on in the general meeting ;) )
• Elastic Search
• EDIfact
• make sure that everyone who has a big large development project that we can get some dedicated sign-off / QA / testing time towards them.
• Keep the queues for PQA / QA / Sign-off moving at a consistent weekly pace (I feel like I will be constantly trying to motivate that work as much as I can - maybe just asking someone to test one thing a week - that’s 24 signoffs in the Release! I’ll just have to ask 20 people to a week to test something :) )