Proposal for RM 18.05 joubu

I (Jonathan Druart aka Joubu) propose to continue and serve as Release Manager for the development cycle of the version 18.05 of Koha.

Evaluation of the 17.11 RM

Please find the proposal I wrote for the previous RM here Proposal_for_RM_17.11_joubu

What has been done?

Enlarging the active contributor list

I have contacted people flying around the Koha community and tried to know what were their priorities, their needs, how much time they could spend to help us etc.

The results are synthesised on the wiki: https://koha-community.org/answers-of-the-poll-ready-to-help-the-koha-community/

New tools

I suggested we setup new tools to help coordination and the creation of workgroups.

Community

The "what's on in koha-devel" has been moved to the k-c.org website for more readability and visibility.

The manual has been improved and is almost ready for 17.11.

I modified the dashboard to add way to follow easily what is waiting for attention

A "koha how-to" guide will help new developers throughout the different step of a patches on our bug tracker

Tomas and I dedicated time on continuous integration server (aka Jenkins). It is now using docker containers for the different supported versions of Koha.

Conclusion

I was willing to increase the participation and the involvement of new and existing contributors.

However, it appears that we have less contributors than before. 17.11 will be one of the release with the least features and enhancements, whereas we have hundreds waiting in our bug tracker.

The bugfixes are not taken care of sufficiently, and on several occasions I have had to skip SO and/or QA step to make things move forward. We reached only 17 contributors in July, a record since 2010.

The new tool I suggested, the kanban, has not been adopted. However regarding the number of people who join it, I still think it fills a community need.

Changes for 18.05

Over the last 6 months, I spent time to motivate people and find new contributors, but sadly it did not work. I guess people are not ready/have time to help us more that they do.

Of course, new contributors still are more than welcome, and I will help them to get their first patches done (give early feedback, etc.). If the community thinks the kanban need to be continued, I will be happy to update them with new idea and feed it again.I will also be available if you have specific or strong needs, or want to participate/help a given topic. I also hope people will let me know their ideas on how to fix the workflow/motivation/etc problems we have.

However, I will concentrate my work on massive push at the beginning of the release cycle, in order to get things moving, end with the endless rebasing of big works in the queue and keep active contributors motivated and have a fresh start.

• Nick (kidclamp) will be RMaint on 17.11 and RM assistant on this release, He will have a clear vision of master and 17.11. He will know what things must be backported and how resolve conflicts.
• The QA team will have their leader back, it will help communication and delegation between RM and QA.
• I am going to continue to apply the "responsibilities" part: reliable people (quick answer/rebase, active on other bug reports (not only selfish), take care of failures related to their patch, meeting participation, etc.) will be "rewarded".

Timeline

Koha 18.05 will be released end of May, if it is considered stable enough for release (i.e. if it has been thoroughly enough tested)