[Koha-devel] [QA] QAing and signing off

[Jared Camins-Esakov]

> > Until now, we said the QA goal was to be concentrated on code quality,
> > testing the feature was made 'somewhere else'. (that's why I also think
> > we could have QA before or after signoff, that's 2 independant things.
> > But I don't see how to achieve that with bugzilla, so I never suggested
> > the idea)
> >
> Hmm I always thought  the first sign off was just testing the patch
> works, QA would test for code quality, regressions, etc. At least
> that's what I expected when I was doing RM. It sounds like it changed
> a bit while Paul was RM, and that is fine after all it was his
> responsibility to decide how he wanted to run his releases.
> We probably need to await Jared awaking, and clarifying exactly what
> he expects from QA for the 3.12 release, since that's what we elected
> him for :)
>

>From my point of view, the reason we elected the six people we did for the
QA team is that we know that those six people understand the big picture of
Koha better than other developers, and would be able to identify places
where regressions are likely. Code quality is important, but less important
than the end user experience, which would be much more marred by the
presence of a regression than the presence of a backtick. So it is my
expectation that when QAing patches our QA team is doing at least some
testing (for the most part I believe this has been done throughout the 3.12
cycle; Marcel, an example of what I'm looking for can be found on
http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=8206 where you
spotted a number of problems in the course of QA). So I don't see that this
requirement adds a significant burden on the QA team. After all, you're
already applying the patch. On the other hand, the presence of the
Signed-off-by line from the QA team *greatly* reduces the burden on me, and
since I have had to push 114 patches (plus merges) *by myself* since
October 30 (and reviewed a fair number more), I think the tradeoff is worth
it. As an example of what I'm talking about, there was one bug where the
author repeatedly marked it "Passed QA" himself, without anyone else
looking at the code or testing it. In order to figure out what happened, I
had to wade through 67 comments on the bug and several pages worth of
history, just to find that no, I hadn't missed the QA team's approval, in
fact the patches never passed QA. There can be no question that I am the
bottleneck for code getting into Koha, and the day that bug wasted was
taken from my review of bug 7067, which probably would have applied had I
been able to use that time to review it.

Regards,
Jared

-- 
Jared Camins-Esakov
Bibliographer, C & P Bibliography Services, LLC
(phone) +1 (917) 727-3445
(e-mail) jcamins at cpbibliography.com
(web) http://www.cpbibliography.com/
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