11-February:
You can see the [rough] draft of what I am planning for us to post to the Replying project page [1] on office wiki (limited access) here: https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:PPelberg_(WMF)/sandbox#Deployment_process

1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk_pages_project/replying

14-February

Update:

• The draft is complete: https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:PPelberg_(WMF)/sandbox#Deployment_process

Next step:

• @Whatamidoing-WMF to review before the plan is published on MediaWiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk_pages_project/replying

https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:PPelberg_(WMF)/sandbox#Deployment_process is okay. I have two suggestions for improvement:

1. Add some dates. Even "February" or "April" is useful.
2. Think about how this interacts with the v1.1 and v2.0 releases. Version 1 is just a bare-bones empty box for typing in, and the future changes are probably going to be popular, but you'd never want to make it opt-out on Tuesday and switch to v 2.0 on Wednesday.

In T244869#5897757, @Whatamidoing-WMF wrote:

https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:PPelberg_(WMF)/sandbox#Deployment_process is okay. I have two suggestions for improvement:

This feedback is helpful – thank you, Sherry. Responses and a resulting question to the points you raised below.

In the meantime, the latest version of the draft can be found here: https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:PPelberg_(WMF)/sandbox#Deployment

1. Add some dates. Even "February" or "April" is useful.

Good call. I've changed the draft some and created a "Deployment status" section wherein I included information about dates. See: https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:PPelberg_(WMF)/sandbox#Deployment_status

1. Think about how this interacts with the v1.1 and v2.0 releases. Version 1 is just a bare-bones empty box for typing in, and the future changes are probably going to be popular, but you'd never want to make it opt-out on Tuesday and switch to v 2.0 on Wednesday.

I agree with the point you're raising about us not wanting anyone to be surprised by changes.

• Question: Do you think it's sufficient for us to broadly committing to not releasing any new version of the software before in an "opt-out state" before contributors to that wiki have had a chance to try it as a Beta Feature?

Next steps

• @ppelberg to finish drafting