Maintenance Sprint 6 (9/20/2022 - 10/03/2022) Recap

The following updates have been made and deployed to the live environment:

• ArchivesSpace security updates were applied to vulnerable plugins.
• Also related to ArchivesSpace: the team assessed the state of custom plugins integrated with ArchivesSpace that are used to faciliate workflows used by the Library's repositories. This analysis task will help greatly when evaluating and estimating the time and effort of future application and security updates, as the variety and complexity of these integrations have made it difficult to do so over time. This also afforded an opportunity to automate some portions of the testing scripts used by the QA team while upgrades are underway in the future.
• Components of LibraryCloud have been updated to address security risks.
  
• Application and module packages supporting Library.Harvard.edu received critical security updates.
• Also related to Library.Harvard.edu, the analytics package powering traffic usage statistics has been updated to leverage newer tagging features for more precise user pattern reports.
• Tomcat server software supporting numerous hosted applications has been updated across the board. Furthermore, certain applications were identified as compatible with using the "nightly build" Tomcat images, which allows them to stay up to date on the latest version automatically. The infrastructure for those applications have been reconfigured and those updates are now live as well..

Midway through the sprint, an urgent update was identified in the Digital Repository Service (DRS) to account for the way billing is now handled. The LTS leadership team agreed to prioritize this over selected maintenance sprint tasks (more on that below). The billing update was completed and deployed last week.

Some tasks originally included in the maintenance sprint required more time and effort than originally estimated. Attention to communication, tasks, and deployments continues this week for a few of them:

• Updating the ACORN application has required more time and analysis than originally estimated: a release with security fixes and supporting software libraries are scheduled to be deployed this week.
  
• Issues with image thumbnails loading quickly by various supported applications has been identified as a symptom of a larger issue that is being addressed in a separate effort outside and beyond the maintenance sprint scope. 
• The issue where images occasionally fail to load properly in the embedded HOLLIS Images viewer continue to be difficult to reproduce consistently. Communication with library stakeholders who originally reported the behavior continues as they assist the Library Systems & Support team in analyzing the problem further to determine root causes.