launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Henning Eggers <henning.eggers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I find QAing on (qa)staging extremely painful and slow. My work flow may be
special but will be recurring for me and others, so I wish we could do
something to speed it up. It goes like this:

1. Do something in the UI.
2. Ask a LOSA to run a script for me.
3. Check the result in the UI.
4. Start again at 1.

I go through this cycle a lot and locally this would be really quick,
recalling the command from the shell history, reloading the desired page(s),
etc. With a LOSA involved who also has other things to do than being my
fingers, this loop may get drawn out very long. Naturally, I lose focus while
waiting for a LOSA to become available which slows me down even further.

The scripts I run are usually cron scripts but may also be helper scripts that
simulate some other part of Launchpad that I don't want to involve. In the
last case the script was uploading translations to a source package which is
usually done by the package builder - but I did not want or need a full
package build in my QA loop ...

What could be done?

Running all cron scripts on staging and qastaging is a first step but not
ideal either because they usually run at longer intervals which again
increases the slow-down.

A launch page would be great where I as a developer could go and manually
trigger a run of any of the scripts and cronscripts in the tree, ideally
passing in parameters and even stdin. It might be useful to organize some sort
of exclusive access around these, though.

The ideal solution would be, of course, to have access to a shell, even a
restricted one. Scripts run from that shell could be monitored closely and
terminated automatically if they consume too much resources, giving an
appropriate error message.

Related but not the same problem: Having some "sudo" in the UI would be great
where I could easily take ownership of a project or team or add myself to any
team. Right now, this involves a LOSA loop, too.

I find the current situation very counter-productive and doing something about
it seems important for our velocity. Are there other possible solutions to
unblock us on QA that I am not seeing?

Cheers,
Henning