2023-09-28 Product Council Agenda and Meeting Notes

Community Council

• Pursued the "Things that could be better about FOLIO" survey - responses due EOD September 29.
• Discussed the "Developer Advocate" Job description/position and budget. Final approval expected within the next week (Slack voting)
• Requesting a new community member step up to manage the translation work for each release. This is roughly 2 hours/week of effort. The writeup is in our last meeting's notes/agenda 
• We are voting on reducing the number of CC members to 13 (from 15) and the votes needed for a quorum to 7 (simple majority). These are recommended due to the realities of the project now vs when the governance model was conceived; the project has changed and to be honest we have less participation than had been anticipated. Also, there are only 13 active members on the council at this time.
• Financially we are on solid ground. Most of this year's membership fees have been received.

Technical Council

• "Regular" TC meeting is now on Mondays for a few months, to accommodate a temporary schedule change, secondary topic-specific meetings are Wednesdays through December.
• Lists app and related have been conditionally approved and will receive further architectural scrutiny. TC approved conditionally for Poppy and the concerns will undergo further review. If there are serious problems, the team will deal with them.
  
  • TC put much effort and discussion into this, the decision was not without controversy. There is a very real concern about timeline pressures and its effect on the integrity of the TC review process. 
• Reviewing our processes around Officially Supported Technologies. Often version updates or sometimes new technologies surface late and cause un-budgeted developer work at the last-minute. An example is the version of postgres is up in 2024.
• Application formalization: subgroup surfaced a number of questions we expect will come up in the community. Note that these are not proposals yet, still in the form of ideas being circulated. RFC process will be needed to formalize.
• Authentication changes: currently authentication tokens do not expire. This will change, Refresh Token Rotation (RTR) is coming with Poppy. This will affect scripts and will require refreshing of the authentication. This is a big lift to make integrations. Poppy will support both methods and the current one will be removed as of Quesnalia. This means the client behind the scenes will notice that the tokens need to be refreshed and do this behind the scenes. This solves the problem of never logging out of FOLIO which is a security issue. Some institutions use SSO. Would it be the same situation for those with SSO? Yes. SSO is the gatekeeper to the 1st token. For those locally hosted, how do people hear about this? TC has asked the question on how this will be publicized. There are also release notes and push out info to the implementers' slack channel. There has been a message to the SysOps channel. Will the user facing aspect of this be pushed to the FOLIO demo sites? Tod will ask those doing the implementation of the demo and testing sites. It would be great to know if this is already on snapshot to test.

Release Management: Will take recommendations for Quesnelia timeline to group. The next meeting is on next week. The group will discuss what people thought about the Quesnelia timeline and bringing back the discussions on release schedules in general. How Quesnelia might affect future releases is speculation. When the group meets, will there be a discussion? Kristin will verify this.

The subtopic of this is the number of releases per year. What number makes sense? Does it make sense to consider this with the re-architecture proposal? We also switched from hotfixes to critical services patches. The CSP approach is worth some discussion along with how often we do a named flower release. We've done more CSPs for Orchid that hotfixes for Nolana. We have to check ourselves and our teams about where we put the effort and careful where we spend our time. Some users have communicated that slowing down would be good. We need to look at the balance between stability and fixing bugs and new functionality. If there are fewer flower releases, this might be even more pressure on the TC and the review process. It does seem that one issue is that we're not finding these critical problems soon enough. Catching a P1 in bugfest is already late. How do we get our QA earlier in the development stream? This has been a problem for some time. The push to automate testing early and often has helped. We need to do better with user acceptance testing. The other challenge is that testing environments doesn't have the data or workflows of the standard FOLIO library. For the development that IndexData is doing, they are testing patron notices for reminder fees in different environments that has helped push out new code. It's great the developers can test their use cases. We need UAT testing earlier. Some cases we need a lot of data and in others we need a variety.

Product Owners

• POs and development teams are working towards Poppy dev freeze (October 6) | Dashboard.
• Owen did a great overview on Testrails | slide deck.
• There are a lot of new POs. Khalilah did an overview on Release notes | See wiki page.
• Julie is creating a page for the team to track product owner meeting topics whether it's tips, to reach out to others, etc. This will help to build agendas. | View meeting notes
• Poppy release - Identify features highlights slide deck that can be used for the release digest slide deck and for press releases. 
• Checklist review (update): Release Readiness Checklist - Template
• Encouraging POs to submit ER&L proposals
• Relaunching Accessibility Reviews with UC-Boulder. First one up is Lists app. Thank you Paul Moeller 

The Feature highlights would be great to see how the roadmap subgroup can tie into that. Is there anything that the PC can do in this area to help define what is needed at point of release for implementers and adopting libraries? There are different purposes for the types of information and we need to get this to the right people using the right language. This seems like a community driven goal. This could be a future topic/discussion.

With the release digest, the implementers SIG is taking that on to see if this is useful for people. It's difficult to predict who needs details and who needs less details.