Dear Community,
If you’ve been following the #openmrs3 slack channel, you’ll know that this October @ibacher @dkigen and I drilled our focus into the O3 release process. This post is a 2-for-1 announcement: Both to announce the 3.0.0-beta.14 release, and to share what we learned from this intentional experiment to try a number of release-protocol-improvements.
OpenMRS RefApp Release 3.0.0-beta14 is out! 
Congratulations to these first-time “official” code contributors: @kajambiya, @kazlaw, @elimm, @NYESIGA, and @DilshanNaveen 
NOTE: Please stay tuned for beta15 which will have a bunch of bug fixes for issues discovered in beta14. Thanks for your patience while we get our release cadence dialed-in.
3.0.0-beta.14 Release Highlights
O3 Core Improvements
- SWR is now a shared library
- The service worker is now opt-in for local development
- Fixes to the openmrs tooling
- A new useDebounce hook
O3 Patient Chart Improvements
- New lab order form and improvements to the order basket
- Forms and Notes widget replaced by the Clinical Form workspace
- Support for printing test results and vitals
- Broader i18n coverage
- Improved workspace implementation
- React Hook Form and Zod
O3 Form Builder Improvements
- Ability to reorder questions via drag and drop
- Ability to copy and download form schemas
- Show form audit information
Angular Form Engine
- We’re now using Angular v14
- i18n everywhere
- 2 Breaking changes
Links
- Detailed Release Notes:
See the O3 Changelog where the exhaustive list of included features and fixes is updated with each release. - Demo Instance: OpenMRS O3 RefApp Demo (admin/Admin123)
Contributors
Alphabetically by Organization affiliation:
- Brown University: @ibacher
- ICRC: @jofrancisco, @luis.oliveira
- Mekom: @bistenes, @kazlaw, @vasharma05
- GSOC: @ayushmishra, @lumuchris256, @randila
- OpenMRS Support: @dkigen, @jayasanka, @Piumal1999 (Fellow)
- Palladium-Kenya: @minimalist, @dkibet
- PIH: @mogoodrich
- UCSF: @kajambiya, @larslemos, @pirupius, @samuel34, @odorajonathan
- Independent Contributors: @DilshanNaveen, @elimm, @Jexsie, @jwnasambu, @nanfuka, @njiddasalifu, @NYESIGA
What We Learned
- We followed the “How to Release the O3 RefApp” guide and that worked fairly well
- The test3 QA Release and Manual QA Checklist did help us catch a lot of bugs. Most of these are fixed or almost fixed and will be included in the next release, 3.0.0-beta.15
- The new E2E test coverage is helping; there were far less “this is obviously visually broken” things discovered in Manual QA than any other O3 releases I can think of. Which is nice because Manual QA time is best spent trying to break things
and use deeper critical thinking 
- Tracking via Fix Version Release Numbers in Jira helps us be way more organized. E.g. see the release numbers here: Log in - OpenMRS Issues You can see we already have a plan for what will go out in the next release.