Release Day Duties

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On this page

• Overview
  • Release day tasks

Overview

Every 22nd of the month we release a new version of GitLab. More often than not we get a spike in community mentions. To help deal with this we have dedicated release advocates that own the effort of responding to community mentions on/after a release.

Every month a different advocate has release advocate duty, which rotates on a monthly basis. If the release day takes place on a weekend, one of the advocates is assigned to monitor the traffic and to process mentions. We keep track of the assignments on the Community Advocates GitLab team calendar.

The two channels that we see the biggest increases in are:

• The GitLab blog
• HackerNews

Release day tasks

• When working a Zendesk ticket that relates to release day, check the "Release Day" box in the left pane of Zendesk before closing out the ticket. This will help the team determine how many Zendesk cases on release day are related to the release. The Community Advocates can leverage this information to ensure that product managers and release managers are able to help with cases on release day.
• Community Advocates should also run a report with the Release Day ticket count prior to release retrospectives meeting and deliver that information to stakeholders at the meeting.
• Copy the overview of the main features or improvements from the beginning of the release blog post and post it to the HackerNews story that comes out during the release. You can use the 11.8 summary post as an example.
• Consider engaging with an Advocate-for-a-day in advance.
• Monitor the #release-post Slack channel throughout the day to be ready at the time the release blog post is published.
• If you are on release duty and will be offline for a period of time, let another advocate know so they can monitor.