My Release Experience with WSO2 IS 6.0.0
I was on my Asgardeo Maintenance rotation when I first saw that I will be moving on to the 6.0.0 release team for my next allocation. It sounded pretty interesting but to make sure I quickly pinged a few others who was already in the release team and got know that I will be spending the next few months in a zoom call with the rest of the release team and we might need to pull off a few late-nighters as well near the end of the release. I wasn’t sure what to feel… should I be excited, since it sounds like a very daring adventure or should I feel nervous as it seems to be a lot of hard work coming up!
Anyways, when the time was up I finally joined the 6.0.0 Release Team! The release work has been going over a course of around 1 year and I joined the team towards the latter part of it. By the time I joined, I had the privilege to closely work with Piraveena akka who managed the release team under the guidance of Isura ayya. It amazed me most of the time to see how she kept tabs on everything that has been going around in the release and still managed to guide us through every single blocker that we faced along the way in our tasks.
There was a very nice composition in our team like a well made cake with the correct amounts of ingredients. There were a set of senior members from the team to oversee the tasks, QA people, different sets of developers to handle migration, org management features, bug fixing and a number of other sub features. The zoom bridge contained different breakout rooms to accommodate these sub teams so that people working on the same features are always together and if needed, the rest of the team members are in their relevant rooms, so we know where to look for them.
At first, I was supposed to fix bugs from a pool of IS issues to make the new release free of critical bugs. Bug fixing started out fun until I saw the whole list of issues we were supposed to fix within mere weeks! But we were never the ones to turn down a good challenge! So we started out fixing from the critical and blocking issues first. Being assigned to fix different issues gave us a great exposure over the length and breadth of the product. What a relief to find out that most of the issues in the pool were either already fixed or were due to misconfigurations. Ohh, the satisfaction in closing issues one by one was pure bliss!
A daily mail was sent with an update of bug-fixing status — our “Bug Fixing Mail”. It had a summary of closed issues for the day, open critical/blocker/major issues and so on. So it was so satisfying to see a higher count in the closed issues for each day in the next morning. Sending the bug-fixing update was OUR responsibility — the bug fixing team’s. So we took turns in sending it which was in a different level of fun — especially when we miss sending it and get a reminder from a bit annoyed Piraveena akka :D.
Working on a release virtually together with the team was a very different experience. Anyway the best thing about the zoom bridge was that, because of it we all felt so connected even through this WFH situation. Whenever someone was needed he/she was there in the call and was so easily reachable. Of course there were times when we forget that we are still joined to the zoom bridge and snooze off for a bit, then suddenly wake up when someone speak-up in the call :D. It is true that this experience would have been a lot better if we were able to physically be in the same place as a team. But given the situation, we made the best out of it this way.
After all these work, we needed a break! Here comes the IAM trip to Heritance Negombo where the whole IAM team spent a nice weekend with our families relaxing and celebrating the successful release. It was a great opportunity for everyone to get together in person and share all the fun memories and stories about past few months as well as to get a break from the virtual relationships and renew our friendships and bonds as a team.
All in all, working towards the IS 6.0.0 was a very novel, fun and exciting experience for all of us. Working towards a common goal with a hovering deadline pushed us all to work together as a team and to uplift our bonds within the team. Helping each other while having fun and a ton of inside stories made this whole release experience a very memorable one. So far, this has been the best sub-team I have worked with after joining the IAM team, with all the great leaderships, friendships and the countless memories to cherish!
