[Koha-devel] Signing-off a patch for a customer

[Chris Nighswonger]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 11:12 AM, Ian Walls <koha.sekjal at gmail.com> wrote:

> To me, the role of QA is to be highly conservative.  The QA team needs to
> look at a piece of incoming code, and not only judge it on how well it does
> it's intended purpose, but how it affects all the other code and workflows
> that surround it.  The folks creating and signing off on code are often
> looking to answer the question "does it work?".  I approach the QA process
> asking the question "what does it break?".
>
> Often times, the answer is "nothing", and we get a great new feature in
> our codebase. But sometimes the patch changes a core function or variable
> declaration in a way that isn't spotted, and only applicable on certain use
> cases.  Or a new dependency is added that conflicts with something
> existing.  Or a security hole is introduced under some conditions.  A
> person asking "does this work?" isn't necessarily going to spot these
> things in their testing; our code is very complex.  I'm sure we can all
> recall cases where piece of code was committed to do one thing, and then
> required a followup because it broke something else under specific
> circumstances.
>
> I strongly believe that having a 'neutral party' to do the QA work is
> essential to keeping our codebase strong and healthy.  We need the fresh
> set of eyes, the different perspective, the alternate use case.  We need
> someone asking "what does it break?", and I don't think the folks who've
> been asking the question "does it work?" are the best suited to that task.
>

+1


Kind Regards,
Chris
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: </pipermail/koha-devel/attachments/20120529/2a26ede5/attachment-0001.htm>