Goal

Instead of scheduled weekly releases switch to a Continuous Deployment methodology. The v1 scope of this Epic is to reach a point where releases may still be triggered and monitored manually, but can happen at any day of the week through out the sprint.

Why is this important?

This will help us move fast and ship things more quickly. It will improve both development and UAT process. As we grow confidence in our testing and deployment process, our code quality will be improved.

Tasks

Some of the tasks need technical changes, either in our app codebase or in our Infrastructure Code, and would definitely need a ticket. But some of the tasks are process changes.

• Automated Visual Regression tests (backstopJS)
  • Investigate how we can work around false negatives caused by Lazy/Progressive image loading.
  • Setup backstop failures to report to a RC channel.
  • Make another pass to NRO Backstop tests and make sure they correspond to a specific page. Make sure the Search page is included
• CI
  • Build assets in CI, so we have less conflicts that delay merges and less error prone merges to production.
• Github/Jira
  • Change methodology to do UAT before merging a PR.
  • Lock merge button unless certain criteria are met (eg. at least 1 Review approval, Tests pass, Commit message linting).
• Release Notes
  • Investigate how we can dynamically create a meaningful Changelog to replace Release notes, so that the community can see what we deploy. Maybe use certain prefixes to commit messages to filter in/out meaningful changes.
  • Inform the community. Investigate a way of publishing the Release Notes automatically.