Hi all, it is Saturday morning and I am sitting here with my cup of coffee so it is probably time for a status update. Hope you all had good holidays and took some time off. I had a great time learning Cocoa and Eclipse on my days off.
We have Sakai 2.2 penciled in for July 15 – we will likely need a longer QA period for 2.2 than any other previous version of Sakai because we will be integrating a number of new software from the community. We may need to do QA from May 15 through July 15.
Sakai 2.1.1 is already in the works – we should tag this soon and begin QA. Hopefully the 2.1.1 QA will be pretty straightforward. The maintenance branch code which makes up 2.1.1 is already in production at IU, so at some level the key element for community QA for 2.1.1 is to make sure we have no regressions from 2.1.
Sakai 2.1.2 is also in the works. This is scheduled for freeze for 2.1.2 in mid February and QA after that. If all goes well, Sakai 2.1.2 will be the base for OSP 2.1 and we will (finally) be at the point where the OSP and Sakai code bases are synchronized. The nice thing about 2.1.2 is that the OSP team will be doing QA on Sakai so we will have a more significant QA effort on the 2.1.2+OSP package. The hope is that folks can go to 2.1.2 Sakai and then “drop in OSP”. It might not be that simple when it all works out – but that is the hope.
In terms of personnel, you have probably heard by now that Carol Dippel resigned as Sakai QA Director back in December. She will still be involved – just not as the QA lead. Carol did a great job for the Sakai project and she produced outstanding results in a challenging environment. We miss her leadership already.
We really cannot go for long without a QA Director – we are working on Carol’s replacement and hope to have it all worked out and announced in time for the new director to lead the 2.1.1 QA effort.
Some big follow on work after the Austin conference is the Sakai Community Practices group. This is in the process of forming a charter. See http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/SCP/Charter for more details.
Another important area is the Requirements Group. There is now a really cool requirements form in JIRA. Go to http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira, Create New Issue, Project: Sakai Requirements, Issue Type: Requirement. The Requirements DG is going to lead a process where the community enters requirements, then prioritizes these requirements, and then we use the resulting list and try to find resources between now and May 15 to work on those requirements that the community wants the most. Of course the best way to get your favourite requirement worked on is to work on it yourself :)