Documentation/Dashboard/Help Release Process

Help Release Process

Current Development and Release Process

The source content of the application help is contained in the CVS module helpcontent2. Currently, the help content is handled like any other source code module with respect to development and release process. Uwe Fischer as the owner of the application help content maintains continuous Child Workspaces to work on constant improvements and bug fixes in the help content. That includes help changes due to new features or changes to existing features. These Child Workspaces are usually named hcsharedXX with XX being a consecutive number.

Uwe fills up the Child Workspace until a reasonable number of issues are covered (reasonable for QA to test), Uwe builds installation sets for three platforms and then hands over the CWS to QA for verification. Some issues are verified by Sun's Docs team beforehand to disburden the QA reps. After handing over a CWS to QA, a successor CWS is created which is used to continue the work.

In addition to this help maintenance CWS, help content for larger features and feature sets is developed inside the feature CWSs owned by the feature owners. Uwe requests to ad the helpcontent2 module to those CWSs and works on the corresponding help content there.

Problem Description

There are several problems around the abovementioned process:

• The release map doesn't leave enough time between feature freeze date and help completion date which is determined by the localization hand-off date
• The localization period is too short to cover larger help wordcounts
• The helpcontent2 module is large (>2,000 files) and presents a bottleneck for CWS maintenance, particularly when part of multiple feature CWSs
• The helpcontent2 module is currently built per platform which is very costly in terms of performance and time
• The helpcontent2 module increases