[Koha-devel] RM and QA roles (important!)

[Jared Camins-Esakov]

Good morning.

I thought about using the subject "In search of lost time," but I decided
that was a bad idea given how few people actually manage to get through
Proust.

I am writing with a discussion question for the community. According to the
dashboard, at the moment we have 120 bugs with the status "Needs signoff"
(25% of these are classified as "bugs" instead of "enhancements" or "new
features") and 94 bugs with the status "Signed off" (50% bugs). 2 bugs have
the status "Passed QA" and are waiting for feedback from their authors
before I push them.

There are two lessons we can learn from these numbers:
1) if everyone currently involved with Koha made a commitment to test two
patches in January, we could get through the backlog for 3.12
2) we have a QA bottleneck.

Please consider lesson 1, but this e-mail is actually about lesson 2. QA is
an inherently time-consuming process, and the pool for QAers is much
smaller than that for signing off. I expect that as we approach the
deadlines for 3.12 the number of bugs awaiting QA will decrease.
Unfortunately, the amount of time I have to deal with those bugs will not
increase, even though I am spending somewhat less time than I planned
dealing with RM duties this month. So, I come to the community with a
question: what would people think of me using that time to QA bugs (as
opposed to enhancements/new features) that I was not involved in the
authorship or signing off of? I would prefer not to do this, but after a
month and a half as RM it seems to me that this might be in the best
interest of the community and the best way to release a stable and
feature-full 3.12. QAing signed off patches would naturally take a much
lower priority for me than addressing patches that have already passed QA,
but every patch I QA is a patch that our overworked QA team does not have
to QA.

Thoughts?

Also, on a somewhat-related subject, I will be away from January
25-February 4. Keep that in mind if you intend to have any questions that
only the RM can answer at the end of the month.

Regards,
Jared Camins-Esakov

-- 
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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