Release plan for February 2018

[brettcannon]

Helpful links & info:

• Milestone
• Last release forked on Feb 01

Schedule

Monday, February 05

Planning

• Evaluate if TypeScript usage needs updating to sync with VS Code's usage
• Evaluate projects & meta issues
• Go through needs PR issues we want to explicitly fix
• Finalize adding initial set of issues to the milestone
• Make sure all issues for this milestone are assigned
• Close issues thatneed more info that have been inactive for over a month

Monday, February 19

Get legal details started

• Announce the lock-down of dependencies for this release
• Make sure CELA has been notified of all changes to the dependencies

Release a beta version for testing

• Update the version to be a beta
• Announce the beta (along with how to help verify fixed issues)

Monday, March 5 (slipped by a week)

• Make sure the repo and distribution TPNs have been updated appropriately
• Merge any last-minute pull requests
• Announce feature freeze

Test the release candidate code

• Update the version number to be an rc
• Announce the release candidate (and how to get the insiders build)

Prep for releasing

• Get team agreement that the code is ready to be released
• Update the changelog (including the names of external contributors)
• Update the version number to be final by dropping the rc suffix
• Make sure CI is passing
• Create the release- branch
• Generate final .vsix file from the release- branch
• Make sure the documentation -- including the WOW page -- has appropriate pull requests
• Begin drafting a blog post

Start preparing for the next release

• Bump the version number to the next alpha
• Make sure the next two milestones exist
• Lift the feature freeze
• Create a new release plan

Clean up after this release

• Mark any straggling fixed issues as verified
• Close the (now) old milestone
• Delete the previous releases' branch

Sometime after March 5

• Upload the final .vsix file
• Publish documentation changes
• Publish the blog post
• Create a release on GitHub (which creates an appropriate git tag)