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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)
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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​

  • Surface release issues either on stable or release candidate by triaging release issues in the react-native repo
    • Some issues might not be tagged appropriately, so keep an eye out on incoming issues and surface any
  • Watch the release discussions repo
    • Help answer/debug/escalate issues
  • Work on any release improvements or if you see something that can be improved; please add!
  • Help test release candidates with your configuration or improve it
  • Engage/help out with discussion in the release related channels (#supporters-feed, #testers-feedback, #release-coordination)

Release Tester Responsibilities​

This role is about helping test release candidates against your production app/workflows

  • Helps surface release issues either on stable or release candidate by them testing out against their production apps and workflows
  • Support regression fixes if relevant
  • Engage/help out with discussion in the release related channels (#supporters-feed, #testers-feedback, #release-coordination)

Who can fill it​

  • Anyone interested in supporting the React Native Open Source project and its releases!
  • 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.