Release plan for 2018.3.0

[brettcannon]

Helpful links & info:

• Milestone

Schedule

[Note that this is a truncated release due to the elongated release cycle for 2018.2.0]

Monday, March 12

• Go through telemetry for GDPR

Planning

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

Monday, March 19

• Go through telemetry for GDPR
• Check there have been no performance regressions

Monday, March 19

• Go through telemetry for GDPR

Get legal details started

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

Release a beta version for testing

• Update the version to be a beta & update the changelog
• Announce the beta development build (along with how to help verify fixed issues)
• Open appropriate documentation issues

Monday, March 26

• Go through telemetry for GDPR

Prep for the release candidate

• Announce feature freeze
• Make sure the repo and distribution TPNs have been updated appropriately
• Ensure all new feature usages are tracked via telemetry
• Make sure no extraneous files are being included in the .vsix file
• Merge any last-minute pull requests

Test the release candidate code

• Update the version to be an rc & update the changelog
• Announce the release candidate development build
• Open appropriate documentation issues
• Begin drafting a blog post

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
• Make sure CI is passing
• Create the release- branch
• Generate final .vsix file from the release- branch
• Make sure the appropriate pull requests for the documentation -- including the WOW page -- are ready

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

Wednesday, March 28 (hopefully 😉)

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