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 normalRelease Cycle, but, it involves fewer components and it is faster. It should be as short as possible (few days) is that, since it is a reaction to a defect in production infrastructure, "patched" version has to be released very quickly.

Acronyms List

Please refer to Acronyms List in Release Cycle section.

Start of Maintenance Cycle

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.

Maintenance Cycle Steps

Figure below shows the Maintenance Cycle workflow. All steps are described one by one in next sections. Mostly, steps in this procedure are the same of correspondent steps in Release Cycle. In this case a reference to the correspondent step section is provided. In case steps differs, a most detailed description is provided.

Preparing the Maintenance Cycle (RMan)

RMan follows same steps as in [Major/Minor Release Cycle procedure|Release Cycle]] (see section Preparing the Release Cycle)

Additionally, RMan must forward ticket that triggered the Maintenance Cycle to Dev

Fixing defects (Dev)

The ticket is received by Dev, who:

• switches to the correct 'Maintenance Branch' in SVN (e.g. branches/org.gcube.1-1). This branch already contains the latest version running in production.
• fixes the defects on the Maintenance Branch and port them the Trunk/HEAD if applicable

Delivering Components (Dev)

In this step Dev deliveries the "patched" component. This step is the same described in Delivering Components section of Release Cycle procedure.

Release of a new ESC (SMan)

Also the fixed component's parent needs to be update. Procedure followed by SMan is the same described in Delivering Subsystems with an addition: the release tickets should include also a reference to the production_support ticket that triggered the Maintenance Cycle

Integration and Testing (RMan, TTeam)

The phase of integration and testing of EPC is conducted in the same way described in following steps of Release Cycle procedure:

• Update EPC
• Building
• Deployment Testing
• Functional Testing

Above steps are collapsed here in one section just for convenience' sake; actually they are executed in the same sequence and with the same transitions as in Release Cycle

Maintenance Cycle closure

Maintenance Cycle closure procedure is exactly the same as in Release Cycle procedure.