[jbosstools-dev] Release Process

[Marshall Culpepper]

Hey guys..

I wanted to hash out the release process we're going to use for the 
upcoming betas and GAs of JBossTools and RHDS.

Below I've listed what I think should be our release process moving 
forward. This is heavily based on the process we used for JBossIDE, with 
some changes to accomodate our new QA resources.

1) All top level components (i.e. "jsf", "richfaces", "hibernatetools", 
"as", etc) are given a tag. In the case of major releases (GAs / major 
functionality changes), we branch instead of tag. In the case of a 
branch, we use HEAD of that branch as the tag (any changes needing to be 
made during the release process will be just committed to HEAD in that 
branch rather than re-tagging/re-branching)
2) An integration build is ran on those tags. If there are any errors in 
the build, the offending components must fix any code/bugs and re-tag.
3) All component owners do smoke testing of their respective code (this 
is just a smoke test to ensure things are working properly).
4) If there are any problems in the smoke testing, the component owner 
is responsible for making the change, re-tagging, and we will re-run the 
integration build (coming back to step #2)
5) Once we have an integration build that everyone is happy with, we 
will run the release build, and pass that on to QA for testing. Any 
problems in this process go back to step #2 for fixing/re-tagging 
(though at this point we continue with release builds instead of 
integration builds)
6) When QA gives the thumbs up we can make the release. The build is 
uploaded to our update site, which receives one last smoke test from 
each component lead. (Any problems are fixed/re-tagged/re-tested).
7) Finally we upload the release to Sourceforge, our build server, the 
public update site, and make the announcement on forums, blogs, the 
download pages, etc.

-- 
Marshall Culpepper
Redhat Dev Studio, JBoss Tools 

http://jboss.org/tools
email: marshall at jboss.org
skype: marshall.culpepper