October 2019 Release Retrospective

[sxa]

Ref: https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/TSC/issues/113 https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/TSC/issues/119 https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/TSC/issues/120 I believe AIX is still outstanding due to some test case issue with math functions.

[smlambert]

Post-mortem notes Things that went well:

• major platforms - pipelines ran well (xlinux, windows, mac)
• daily release calls & slack discussion helpful
• having a central issue to track release https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/TSC/issues/119 is good

Things that hindered release:

• loss of AIX machines (down to 1 for build and test during this period)
• only build team knows how to launch build pipelines (no doc, unclear how openjdk mirrors and tags work)
• not everyone puts links or build IDs to builds or tests in the central issue, hard to track down jobs later

Suggestions for improvement:

• machine audit a few days ahead of the release (know how many machines are healthy, fill gaps where needed if possible)
• document how to launch build pipelines (how to determine what tags to use, etc)
• ensure tests are triaged fully prior to the release so it is clear if new failures arise
• add annotation feature to trss (to indicate which are the candidate and real pipeline jobs for releases)
• create an 'executive summary' view of a release in trss or refer to the trss grid view that can be linked to from the central issue
• create tutorial on how to use trss for triaging releases

[sxa]

Doc issue (ref build pipelines) is something I'm working to address - hope to make more progress on that over the next week as I already have a draft kicking around but particularly for point releases it's not clear what options to use. Alsothe OpenJ9 side of it that's a bit problematic to cover - HotSpot is fairly easy to explain from that perspective ;-) The doc I have is based on one that was written purely for OpenJ9 so I've had to do a bit of refactoring on it.

Hopefully AIX will be assisted in some capacity by us having two providers now for AIX to give us a bit more redundancy (although a bit more setup is still required)

And yep ensuring links are in the "main" release issue should be heavily encouraged / mandated unless impractical for some reason.

[andrew-m-leonard]

When is the latest Release Retrospective going to be scheduled?

[andrew-m-leonard]

We've come up with these ideas to address known issues with releasing:

• Investigate & implement "concurrent" AdoptOpenJDK "build pipeline" support
• Investigate/pursue "in-progress" TRSS view for build pipeline status
• Grinder Slack notify support at AdoptOpenJDK
• Review Adopt Nightly Build+platform and tests+platform scheduling for optimum execution

[lumpfish]

* Investigate/pursue "in-progress" TRSS view for build pipeline status

Created https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/openjdk-test-tools/issues/174

[adamfarley]

All remaining actions here appear resolved, as discussed in the 2021 January retrospective.

@sxa - Please close.