Release Roles and Responsibilities

Here we set guidelines to apply the “dividi et impera” approach to React Native releases: it is an involved process and we need to clarify the work to allow for easier rotations of folks in various positions.

The roles should be imagined as “concentric”, with #1 in the centre: this means that anything in role #3 can be done by #2 or #1, and anything on role #2 can be done by #1.

The goal of this structure is that #1 doesn’t have to do everything: to do so the suggestion is to at least always have a person per each role in each release.

Release Role #1: Meta Releasers (x2)

Details

Two sub-roles:

• 1 release captain as main point of contact per minor release (aiming for every 2 months, see schedule)
• 1 reverse shadow per minor release — working on high-need tooling (perhaps from retrospective of previous minor release) and serves as backup if release captain is out

Time commitment: maximum 4 hours/week of work for each release captain and reverse shadow.

Release Captain Responsibilities

• Drives the initial cut and sets up release scaffolding (re: blogpost draft, documentation bump, etc)
• Is informed of the pre-release & stable release status and any blocking issues and communicates to appropriate channels
  • Attends & drives weekly release meeting
  • updates and monitors the #releases channel
  • updates and monitors discussion in react-wg/react-native-releases discussion for both:
    • the pre-release
    • the stable release (for patches)
• Make final call on release decisions
  • Decide when to promote pre-release to stable (in consult with co-pilot and release supporters)
  • Decide when to release a patch on stable
• Ensures blocking issues have owners
  • Escalate internally if release community is blocked by Meta-owned dependencies (metro, folly, flipper, hermes, etc)
  • Coordinate with release co-pilot & supporters on any community library blockers (reanimated, cli, etc.)
• Escalates security alerts
  • When a security alert gets raised, communicates it quickly to relevant partners and internally
  • If the security fix commit lands and it’s important, coordinates with the copilot on which stable branches should get the releases and produces the patch releases accordingly
• Can perform release or delegate release steps (as well as release co-pilot/reverse shadow)

Reverse Shadow Responsibilities

• Is informed of the minor release status and current stable status
• Supports release captain
  • Fills in for release captain if current release captain is unavailable
• Actions on high-priority tooling, retrospective action items when relevant

Who can fill it

• These roles must be filled by Meta engineers

Release Role #2 : Release Copilot

Details

• 1 or 2 people (the second one being backup)

Time commitment: can be more flexible and doesn’t have to align with minor release schedule, but we should update the release schedule when needed. Most likely, a couple hours per week.

Responsibilities

• Is informed of the minor release status and current stable status
  • attends weekly release meeting
  • updates and monitors #releases channel
  • updates and monitors discussion in react-wg/react-native-releases discussion for both:
    • the pre-release
    • the stable release (for patches)
• Ensures blocking issues have owners
  • Escalate to Meta releaser when blocked by Meta-owned dependencies (metro, folly, flipper, hermes, etc)
  • Find owners, coordinate with Meta releaser for any community library blockers (reanimated, cli, etc.)
• Support release decisions
  • Help decide when to promote pre-release to stable
  • Help decide when to release a patch on stable
  • Help decide which commits are part of which release
• Can perform release (pre-release/stable)
  • Merge cherry-picks (as agreed with main releaser)
  • Create the changelog & release entry in GH
  • Makes documentation PR and blogpost PR
  • Trigger the rn-diff-purge script to update upgrade-helper (this should be automated for 0.68 onwards)
• Help release testing via local E2E script

Who can fill it

• This role can be filled by anyone with write access to the necessary repos (react-native)

Release Role #3: Release Supporter

Details

• 0 to N release supporters
• 0 to N release testers

Time commitment: as much or as little as available by each person.

No strict coupling with any specific release - active supports and testers will be thanked in the release notes of versions they help with.

Release Supporter Responsibilities

• Helps surface release issues either on stable or release candidate by triaging release issues in the react-native repo
• Contributes to CI in the OSS repo to improve the testing infrastructure
• Help release testing via local E2E script
• Communicates with the other roles via the #supporters-feed & #testers-feedback channels

Release Tester Responsibilities

• Helps surface release issues either on stable or release candidate by them testing out against their production apps and workflows
• Points out relevant commits to add to a specific release
• Communicates with the other roles via the #supporters-feed & #testers-feedback channels

Who can fill it

• Anyone interested in supporting the React Native Open Source project and its releases!
  • To start, you can participate in the discussion repo -- testing release candidates, surfacing any release issues you've seen or encountered yourself
  • We also have some discussions about improvements here as well as some issues related to improving the release process in this project board.
    • If you are up for any specific tasks, let us know by commenting on it.
• For release testers, it's preferred (as it's very valuable) that you are able to test the releases against a production app in order to also verify non-trivial parts of the flow like archiving a release for the App Store.

Apply to the role

For both supporters and testers, you can let us know that you want to help out in this dedicated discussion. We will provide you access to a dedicated RN Discord server that folks involved the releasers use to coordinate.