Meeting Minutes for 06/01/2021

Demo of new features, bug fixes, and documentation for the upcoming release (Minute )

• Release Notes

Discussion of development priorities for the next release - Road Map (Minute 47:17)

• The roadmap is halfway completed
• Following this quarter release, Marmot will be doing their next roadmap management or absolute sequencing process
• The team will look at feedback from the feature request from the survey
• Q3 plan has three earlier user stories that were prioritized from a past survey
  • There are still some items in the backlog that the team wants to make sure are included in a specific plan
  • Series enhancement items were identified as part of a Pika stable build or Pika 1.0 concept
• Marmot is going to be delving into Pika containerization and working on a project description 
• Marmot will be on the Pika containerization in conjunction with an overall Cloud strategy with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• The idea being that Pika containerization rather than having one monolithic codebase existing on hardware sitting in Marmot offices, Marmot will be able to split the codebase into modular sections, some of which might be hosted in the Marmot office, and some of which might be hosted by AWS, or having AWS as a backup option.
• Through containerization, processes are able to run faster, and it also saves Marmot from having to buy servers that are configured for the greatest possible use.
• Instead, Marmot could buy servers that meet normal use and allow for a spin-up of the excess memory or compute the indexing required. 
• Looking further ahead into the last quarter of the year, Marmot will hopefully begin working on some very foundational Pika integrations with FOLIO (note: FOLIO development is outside of Marmot’s hand). Marmot is looking at ways to take the content that Marmot has found in its gap analysis and see if they can slide that into the development pipeline for FOLIO.    
• An updated version of the roadmap will be sent out after the roadmap management meeting.
• Marmot welcomes any feedback on the current or future roadmaps. or the feedback collection process in terms of ranking and keeping feature requests moving through the development pipeline.       

July supplemental release 

• Solr upgrade (Minute 45:42)
  • All the test sites (except Northern Waters) are on the newest version of Solr.
  • Pascal had to do some load testing and other work before he was ready and confident to push it into production.
  • The Pika team is close to being able to upgrade their search engines but this will need to wait until a special July deployment because the Solr upgrade requires a lot of system administration work.
  • During the Solr upgrade, all the sites will need to be reindexed because it is a whole new index and a whole new version of the search engine.
• OverDrive magazines improvements (Minute 46:47)
  • The current functionality is that you can check out the latest issue from OverDrive. The OverDrive API allows Pika to checkout and display other issues.
  • C.J. was really close to finishing this functionality but other wrap-up work needed to be accomplished so this new functionality will be released during the July deployment as well. 

Other discussion topics (Minute 51:37)

• Mobile-view improvements
  • The Pika team received a few tickets about mobile-view impro
  • Getting back to the home view on the mobile view tends to be tricky depending on how things are set up for your library
  • When searching you get the search suggestions that are hard to get out of in the mobile-view
  • Ashley would like to build a ticket outlining a few things the Pika team would like to do for mobile improvements
  • Ashley proposed to bring that ticket or a group of smaller tickets to the group prioritization for the next couple of releases

The next meeting is Tuesday, September 7, 2021