2.5 Release and QA Happenings of late

I'm back from a hiatus I took from posting to my blog and from here on out plan to be posting much more frequently. Between my last post and now life has pretty much focused on testing and preparing for the Sakai 2.5.0 release. Those of you familiar with the our past time lines, the testing cycle for 2.5 has been much longer - we're well past the 5 month mark. While this is a little longer than I'd like to see, this extra time has allowed us to refine our processes for the betterment of the release. When it's all said and done I believe well have a better tested release that folks can confidently install than ever before.

We're so close to releasing I can taste it! There was a last minute gotcha design bug with new functionality with the gradebook. The project team was able to quickly work with the community to determine a solution that wouldn't result in a substantial amount of time being added to the testing and release cycle. The speed in which the community can rally together to resolve a problem never ceases to amaze me. We should have the final release candidate to go on Monday and my hope is that the code will be good to go by mid-week. Once the release artifacts are built, 2.5.0 should be officially announced.

Then the community can turn it's attention to a 2.5.1 maintenance release . . . .

On a sad note, I learned last week that Margaret Petit's contract with Stanford is up. I'm fairly certain that Margaret predated my involvement in Sakai. She's been a great asset to the QA WG and contributed greatly to moving quality forward. To give you an idea of the impact she's had, she's filed 459 bugs (which btw, is more than I have!) and verified countless others. With all that knowledge and experience with Sakai, it is my hope that another institution snatches her up and that she is able to continue to work on the project.