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

[Chris Cormack]

On 30 May 2012 12:30, Chris Nighswonger <cnighswonger at foundations.edu> wrote:
> 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
>
+1 from me also

Chris