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

[Magnus Enger]

On 30 May 2012 02:38, Chris Cormack <chris at bigballofwax.co.nz> wrote:
> 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

+1

Magnus Enger
libriotech.no