We are working on the release of RAFT II. This is a major release. This checklist tracks is the current release path of RAFT II to the service operations, primarily from the Business Intelligence development team to Customer Support, Training, and Server & System Administration. 

Initiation

• Points of contact and release team defined in Roster.
• Training teams from IS&t and COEUS engaged; Training Plan.
  • Critical Path: Need stable test environment.
• Usability team engaged; Usability & Accessibility.
• business-support team engagement, SLA in development: Service Levels Development
• Stakeholder committee schedule in place, core business users signed up for rolling usability-test plan.

Planning

• Enter release date, and other significant dates, on Change Communications Calendar.
  • Are hard dates (i.e. less than two weeks slippage) ready?
• Planned major milestones recorded on wiki home page.
• Consider how to support early adopters or pilot users, phase out current version?
  • Pilot release in May, community release in June. Still no hard transition plan for RAFT I users?
• Internal IS&T internal architecture-review team formed. Six-week code burn-in period required between code-completion and go-live.
• Code management/versioning and continuous integration plan with release engineer. Deploy from Bamboo or directly from SVN.
  • Awaiting stable test release to raft-test for system operators to review the install.
• Review need to de-support of previous version(s), communications to current users.
• Create communication plan, based on stakeholders identified in prior steps.
• Create smoke-test plan with business-support team. Due before June go-live.

Executing

• Provision systems, VMs, based on initial architecture plan.
  • New raft-test and raft-prod systems in place. To replace existing RAFT I servers.
  • Await decision on budget for online help systems. bi-help-dev installed on temporary system so documenation staff can begin work.
• Update datacenter SLAs with technical, financial, business contact information.
• Developing blanket SLA between business-support and Business Intelligence team.
  • Draft in progress. Service Levels Development
• Training curriculum, work with Training to ramp-up Help Desk (business-support).
• Stakeholder engagement: Trying to move design documents to wiki for better collaboration, resources limited.
• Develop RAFT escalation scripts from Tier 2 (business-support) and Tier 3 (raft-support). Support Escalations Outline
• Phased usability test plan underway with phased rollout of RAFT functionalitY: Usability & Accessibility.

Monitor and Control

• If actual dates do not match previously expected dates, update calendar.
• business-help and business-intelligence teams to perform smoke tests for every patch or update during burn-in period.
• If sending outside of IS&T, send draft release announcement to IS&T communications team at least 2 business days prior to release.
• Inform release-core@mit.edu, pipeline of release at least 1 business day prior to release.
• Release (Send announcement, deploy final production release, etc.)
• Second architecture review required, same reviewers, after May pilot release.
• Revise smoke tests and escalations as needed.

Closing

• Send announcement and change log to release-core@mit.edu, stakeholder list once release is complete.
• Update any known open issues (Jira, Request Tracker) affected by release and close.
• Search http://ist.mit.eduand http://kb.mit.edufor any articles that would be invalidated by release and update as needed. Contact istweb@mit.edu if you are not sure how to update this documentation.