Maintenance Release Cycle procedure

Introduction

Maintenance Cycle aims to correct one or more defects discovered in a gCube software running in production infrastructure. A Maintenance Cycle is very similar to a normal Release Cycle, but it involves fewer components and, therefore, it is faster to integrate. It should be as short as possible (few days) since it is a reaction to a defect in production infrastructure and a "patched" version has to be released very quickly.

Maintenance Cycle Steps

Maintenance Cycle starts when an incident ticket is opened for a defect found in production and the ticket is classified as high priority. Once developers resolves the defect, a new patched version of gCube must be released following the Maintenance Release Cycle.

Note 1: priority is assigned by Support Team during Incident Management procedure. Therefore, it is the Support Team that decide whether a Maintenance Cycle will be triggered or not.

Note 2: other 'production_support' defects involving Developers and the Release Team (i.e. category:Software Incident and priority:low) have to be fixed in the trunk/HEAD and will be delivered in production along with the next gCube release.

Excepting for the trigger event, a Maintenance release cycle follows exactly the same steps of release preparation, integration and closure of a normal Release Cycle.