Re: 5.12 release: congratulations and post-mortem

Hi Nate,

first of all, thank you for all your help during this process, and thank
you for putting this list together.

If you're OK with that, I think we should use your suggestions during the
Promo sprint to establish a clear release workflow.
Of course, it'll be even better if we manage to set one up before the
sprint! :)

I definitely support the idea of tracking this on Phabricator (and I'm not
sure why we haven't done that in the first place...).

Another thing I would suggest is setting deadlines for feedback, to avoid
people jumping in with comments and requests for changes at the last
minute.

Naturally, if there are some important, big changes coming straight from
the developers (e.g., a feature was removed from the release), that should
be accepted after the deadline, but requests for using a different word in
a sentence...maybe not so much.

This deadlines thing should also cover Ilya's point about making sure that
the text is locked and ready well enough in advance for the translators.

If I think of anything else, I'll let you know.

Thanks,
Ivana Isadora

2018-02-06 17:12 GMT+01:00 Ilya Bizyaev <[email protected]>:

> Another problem is that announcement text has been changed many times in
> last 2 days, and all the translations were broken. I think by the
> announcement time, we should have translations in place, so the text has to
> be finalized in advance.
>
> Cheers,
> Ilya.
>
>
> ---- On Tue, 06 Feb 2018 18:54:19 +0300 * [email protected]
> <[email protected]> * wrote ----
>
>
> Congrats on a fantastic release of Plasma 5.12 everybody! People are
> really gonna love it.
>
> The release process was a bit rockier than expected, and I thought I
> might do a post-mortem to see how we can make the next one smoother:
>
>
>
> Problem: Initial request for release notes was not seen by many
> ===============================================================
> Solutions:
> - Send email to [email protected] and [email protected] as well
> - Use a Phabricator task instead of email to track overall work
> - Make a subtask to track gathering release notes from developers
> - Delegate a specific person (Ivanna?) to be responsible for turning the
> release notes into final marketing copy
>
>
>
> Problem: Unclear roles; nobody knew who owned the beta announcement
> ===================================================================
> Solutions:
> - Make roles and responsibilities clear to all; assign specific people
> to specific tasks
> - Make the KDE Promo crew the guardians of everything public-facing
>
>
>
> Problem: Unclear access to the kde.org website
> ==============================================
> (At once point, changes were requested and planned, but the one person
> that everybody knew had access was on vacation)
>
> Solutions:
> - Define who should have access ahead of time
> - Get those people access to the website ahead of time
>
>
>
> Problem: Promo video produced at the last minute, gating final release
> ======================================================================
> Solutions:
> - Supply whomever is making the video with a pre-release copy of Plasma
> 5.12 at least a few days in advance so that the video can be completed
> sooner
>
>
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Nate
>
>
>


-- 
Ivana Isadora Devcic
Promotion & Marketing, KDE.org
@kdecommunity on Twitter <https://twitter.com/kdecommunity> || KDE on
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