Simplify Release Note Process by Publishing Directly After Production Deployment

[coreycarvalho]

User Story - Business Need

Problem:
The current pipeline involves creating draft release notes after the staging deployment step and later publishing them after manual approvals. This approach was initially designed to allow for edits to the release notes if necessary but is no longer required.

Proposal:
Streamline the process by removing the step that creates draft release notes. Instead, publish the release notes directly after the production deployment step (deploy-to-prod) and before the Slack notification step (send-slack-notifications).

• Ticket is understood, and QA has been contacted (if the ticket has a QA label).

User Story(ies)

As a DevOps engineer
I want to streamline the release note publication process in the continuous deployment pipeline
So that we eliminate unnecessary steps, reduce complexity, and ensure release notes are published immediately after production deployment.

Additional Info and Resources

Current Process:

• Release notes are drafted during the pipeline after the staging deployment step.
• Draft release notes are published later in the pipeline after manual approval steps.
• This approach was initially implemented to accommodate multiple approvals and allow editing of release notes.

Proposed Change:

• Remove the step that creates draft release notes (create-release-notes job).
• Modify the pipeline to publish release notes directly after the deploy-to-prod step but before the send-slack-notifications step.

Pipeline Reference Code:

• Current relevant jobs: create-release-notes, publish-release-notes.
• Adjust placement of publish-release-notes so it follows deploy-to-prod.

Acceptance Criteria

• The create-release-notes job is removed from the pipeline.
• The publish-release-notes job is modified to run directly after the deploy-to-prod step.
• The pipeline successfully publishes release notes immediately after production deployment.
• The Slack notification step (send-slack-notifications) follows the updated publish-release-notes step.
• This work is added to the sprint review slide deck (key win bullet point and demo slide).

QA Considerations

Potential Dependencies

Out of Scope