MRenvoize/RM

Proposal

I propose standing for the Release Manager position for the next two koha release cycles (19.11 and 20.05). I would act as per the guidelines on project roles whilst also attempting to encourage improvements to the development culture by trying to introduce more collaboration between parties.

Release Management is very team dependant and as such I would lean heavily on the amazing efforts of the QA team and try to maintain a close relationships with them throughout the cycles. I'd like to take more of an active role, alongside the QA Manager, in assigning SO/QA resources to important bugs encouraging quicker iteration and faster feedback.

19.11

I will strive to make 19.11 a healthy and polished release.

• I'd like to focus on Acquisitions, in particular improving workflows, accountability/auditability and accuracy.
• I don't believe Mana has received the attention it needs during the last cycle and I would like to see some polish and enhancement in this area. Perhaps looking into extending it to manage plugins and perhaps investigating federation of Mana servers.
• Elasticsearch has become a first class citizen during the last few cycles and I'd like to see that continue to flourish under my leadership.
• I would encourage continued efforts on the REST API, and hope the new RMaint team adopt the backporting policies I put in place during my tenure as RMaint.

I'd really like to see continued enthusiasm for the following too:

• Continued refactoring efforts
• Continued improvements to the test suit
• More code golf to refine bugs that are 'nearly there'
• Keeping submissions small, focused and testable wherever possible

20.05

The 19.11 cycle was a slow cycle with the statistics showing a clear drop in the spread of SO and QA resources. I want to attempt to combat this by publishing a monthly review of the current state of play highlighting the top contributors and praising their efforts.

• Accounts foundations have moved forward significantly during the 19.11 cycle; I'd like to see enhancements in this area flourish now the foundations are firm.
• Acquisitions is still a target area as above.
• Mana received some attention very late in the 19.11 cycle and I'd like to see that continue into the next.
• Elasticsearch is going from strength to strength, lets continue that.
• I would like to also focus on database improvements, enhancing our constraints and improving data integrity.

I encourage a continued enthusiasm for:

• Refactoring efforts and more of a team approach to this.
• Test suit enhancements and CI improvements to catch a broader range of failure cases.
• Continued code golfing.