[Koha-devel] Proposed QA Enhancements

[Chris Nighswonger]

I am making two proposals that will help "tighten" up our QA procedures a
bit in order to facilitate clarity and transparency in our patch
submission/acceptance workflow. Currently the workflow is described in the
wiki here:

http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Bug-enhancement-patch_Workflow#Steps

1. I propose that we modify step 5 to read:

"The patch is checked and signed-off by the QA team member. Then the bug
status is set to Passed QA"

This will ensure that we have clarity that the patch was, indeed, touched
by a member of the QA team, as well as increasing the accuracy of QA stats
in git.

2. I propose that the RM be the QA of last resort. At present the stats
show that the RM is doing the majority of the QA'ing. "Last resort" is a
condition evoked by all members of the current QA team acknowledging that
no one among them has the time, etc. to do QA on a particular patch the RM
feels needs to be pushed OR by a bug remaining in the "Signed Off" status
beyond a fixed time period of four weeks. This mechanism would address
concerns of bug stagnation by allowing ample time for QA members to at
least glance at a bug and determine of they do or do not have time to give
to that bug as well as having a catch mechanism for bugs falling through
w/o notice.

Here are some statistics on sign-offs by the currently listed QA team for
commits between the 3.6.0 and 3.8.0 tags:

NOTE: 100% of our patches have the minimum required 1 sign-off by any
community member

Total commits: 1086

Sign-offs by QA Team members:

Marcel de Rooy - 43
Jonathan Druart - 5
Paul Poulain - 538
Ian Walls - 25

Total commits w/sign-off by a QA team member: 611 OR 56.3%
Total commits w/sign-off by RM: 538 OR 49.5%
Total commits w/sign-off by non-RM QA member: 73 OR 6.7%

These figures reasonably agree with the stats posted here:
http://blog.bigballofwax.co.nz/2012/04/24/statistics-for-koha-3-8-0/

You may reproduce them on your local git repo master branch by using
variations of the following:

git log --grep="^Signed-off-by: <regexp>" --no-merges --oneline
52c666edce42..5c32a9f811d | wc -l

Lets have some discussion on the two proposals above, and I'll put them on
the agenda for the next IRC meeting to be voted on.

Kind Regards,
Chris
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: </pipermail/koha-devel/attachments/20120521/22aa87e2/attachment.htm>