[Koha-devel] QA on Stable Branch

[Pierrick LE GALL]

Hi Koha core community,

Joshua wrote:

> Now that pierrick has retired as QA manager ...

I would like to give an external point of view, a kind of advice due to
my experience on widely distributed project: on a stable branch, no new
feature. Not even a single new field or anything. Only bug correction. I
would even say: only trivial bug and blocking bug. Keep bug with
workaround for next stable branch.

This may sound crazy, but you must understand that if users agree to
make many tests when migrating to a new stable release (eg from 2.2.x to
2.4.0), they certainly consider they can upgrade from 2.2.x to 2.2.x+1
without needing to check that the application still works.

The real problem with this QA policy is the frequency of creation of
stable branches. This is why a fixed length period of 6 months (more or
less) between two stable branches is fine: each user know that she will
have to wait no more than 6 months before having her feature made
official.

When a project has a variable length period between two stable branches,
many problems come from the fact that users want their feature right now
is the current stable branch because they have no idea how long they
will have to wait before having it a new stable branch.

Cheers

-- 
Pierrick LE GALL
http://le-gall.net/pierrick