Release Checklist

These are the steps involved in performing a Mantid release.

Preparation

Send an email to Mantid-developers asking everyone to ensure they have closed their tickets, allow one to two hours for compliance.
Collect all of the completed, fixed tickets for that iteration.
Parse through the list and short list all of the "major points" that may be important to the users.

Ensure the build has passed, and all of the unit tests have succeeded on all build environments for this release.
Create a directory under kits called "Undergoing Testing"
Copy the current development build msi into this directory together with the installation packages for any other environments (for Linux RPMs see below).
Install the Mantid msi.
Perform unscripted testing concentrating on the following.
- New Functionality: This should investigate both functionality and usability. Particularly the "major points" list.
- Highly used domain algorithms (such as align detectors – diffraction Focussing).
- Graphing and graph interaction, 1D, 2D and 3D. Including multiple plots from several workspaces.
- Instrument view on at least 2 known instruments and interactions with the user interface.
- Printing and saving/loading data.
- Checking help pages particularly for new algorithms.

Create a set of release notes in the "Undergoing Testing" directory. Base them off the previous release as a template.
While performing the unscripted testing of the "major points" collect screenshots and fill in the release notes.
Be careful to avoid the following in word as they do not translate well to html.
- Two spaces after a full stop.
- Space dash space as windows adjusts the dash.
- Smart quotes (best to turn these off or use the back tick `)
Test the release notes by navigating to them through download.mantidproject.org, not just clicking on the file.

Once the unscripted testing has passed and the Release Notes are complete.
Create an iteration tag on the repository for the SVN revision that passed testing.
Phone Freddie to ask him to kick of an RPM build for that specific release. In the future this step will be replaced by a web page to start this off.
Rename the directory from undergoing Testing to the version number (e.g. 1.0.3187).
Send an email to mantid announce including the text of the release notes to announce the new release to our existing users.
Forward a copy of this email to Mantid Developers to let them know the release has occurred.