[Koha-devel] Proposal for Assistance with QA Testing for Koha 3.6

[Ian Walls]

Dear Community,


As you are likely aware, I am the elected Quality Assurance Manager for the
3.6 release.  As you may also be aware, there are currently 96 patches in
Bugzilla that are signed off and ready for QA testing (at the time of this
writing).  My goal for my term as QAM was to keep this list under 10, but as
we can see, that's not the current state of things.

I do not want to become a bottleneck against good code getting into Koha.
Quality Assurance is by it's nature a painstaking process, especially with
more complex patches, to ensure that there are no regressions of
functionality, or massive, unexpected shifts in default behavior.  Often,
numerous configurations of data need to checked against, to make sure fixing
a bug for one possible setup doesn't cause a new bug in another.  So far,
we've not had to pull any code from master due to a regression, so it seems
this process is working.  But, that said, we've still got nearly a hundred
patches waiting in the queue.

Paul Poulain has offered to assist me with QA for the remainder of the Koha
3.6 release cycle.  He's got the hours to dedicate towards this, and can
help put some of these patches through their paces.  While anyone can test
any patch that's been published (and everyone is encouraged to do so), Paul
is asking for the additional power to mark the patches he's tested as
"Passed QA" if they do indeed pass his tests.  Here are the exact terms of
the proposal:

a) he would not mark any patch he himself has written as Passed QA
b) any patch written by BibLibre would need a signoff from another, external
person before he'd test it
c) he would start with the patches that have been waiting the longest
d) the QAM and RM could reject any "Passed QA" patch if they feel it's not
sufficient for whatever reason (which would need to be noted in the bug
report)

I do not feel that I necessarily have the right to transfer the "mark
patches as Passed QA" power over to another person without the community's
consent.  So, I bring this to the group.  Is this an acceptable proposal?
Does the QAM have the right to "deputize" community members and transfer
this particular power, or does the community need to vote on it?  Are there
any aspects of the issue that I'm missing?

Thanks for your consideration and attention on this matter,



-Ian



-- 
Ian Walls
Lead Development Specialist
ByWater Solutions
Phone # (888) 900-8944
http://bywatersolutions.com
ian.walls at bywatersolutions.com
Twitter: @sekjal
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