4.3 Retrospective Results

I missed posting the 4.3 post mortem recap before I went on vacation, so without further ado:

We discussed the 4.3 release in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., where I asked for things that should be improved and things that went well, in order to get some feedback on how I did and helpful tips for future release leads (please find the Slack log here):

Should be improved:

  • Figure out some ways to get more testing and more eyes on betas and RCs.
  • Not having feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins. complete (with coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing.) before the merge window.
  • The menu customizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. proposal could have been written differently in anticipation of community perception.
  • The people who are able to test term splitting properly are very limited. Not sure how to wrangle people for this kind of specialized testing.
  • there seemed to be a lack of movement at the end of the cycle.
  • Features like site icon should be done as a feature plugin.
  • The merge proposal could have been proof-read by someone from the core team.
  • Getting dev-notes written up earlier.
  • There were also not a lot of feature plugins ready for core at the start of 4.3.
  • Don’t think it’s really okay to be relaxing standards in the name of forcing something to fit a deadline.
  • We did a freeze/RCrelease candidate One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). maaaaybe 24 hours before release that had significant changes in it, that did not feel good.
  • We completely changed features after betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1.
  • I think in 4.2 we discovered that have a core mentor involved much earlier also helped get it to that “ready” place. Or closer to ready.
  • Find a way to increase participation for bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. scrubs.

Went well:

  • passwords went really well.
  • We had a solid crop of guest committers that really made things go well for there project area.
  • Update to 4.3 went really smoothly over all as well.
  • We had some epic traction on Formatting component patches during this cycle. I’m a bit surprised how many tickets we closed with 4.3 because those are usually very problematic.
  • Touch and small screen usability improved significantly. Two of my top five issues were fixed outright and progress was made on a third.
  • I demoed the keyboard shortcuts in the editor to some people and they were like “DAMN, that’s amazing”.
  • i’m really happy about list table changes!
  • Shared taxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. terms are dead.
  • WE RELEASED ON TIME!!!!

I’m probably a little biased, but contrary to what the amount of bullet points in each section might suggest, I agree with @samuelsidler who said: “Almost everything went really smooth.” I’m proud of what we accomplished, and the download and update numbers speak for themselves. Thank you again for everyone who helped out during the release, let’s make 4.4 even better!

#4-3, #post-mortem #retrospective

WordPress 4.3 Post Mortem

I’d like to do a review of the WordPress 4.3 release cycle, talk about what went well, what didn’t, and ideally derive specific items that we can improve on.

Let’s do that in the #core channel on Slack on August 24 2015 20:00 UTC, the usual dev chat time.

#4-3, #post-mortem