launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Robert Collins <robert.collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 2:32 AM, Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I really do like these emails.


> gary_poster: Changed goals, or even the perception of changed goals,
> when nearing the end of a project is demotivating.  Robert wants to run
> the devel and db-devel tests simultaneously on the same slave.

I'd like to add a little precision here - I want to optimise the
landing time on devel, which is simpler to do via a larger machine,
but that means the money comes from somewhere - and colocating the two
test run environments was an appealing target: I've got no intrinsic
desire to run two different tests concurrently: that was a tactical
approach to 'but buildbot may not make serialising easy'. Obviously
this didn't come through in our call: sorry about that.

>  We had
> tried that initially, a couple of months ago, and turned it off because
> it was causing problems; recent tests on 32 core machine show that
> contention of resources (what resources? not sure) can still cause
> problems.  We didn't know that this was an actual goal.  It would have
> been nice to know Robert’s sharing plans/desires earlier--we would have
> been testing that scenario all along.  Could we have done a better job
> gathering requirements from him?

I could have written down that that was an explicit parameter in the
scenarios - it dropped out of sight for a while :(.

> Discussion of term “requirements
> gathering” ensues.  benji suggests replacing term with “requirements
> waterboarding”.  We wish we would have had the co-location requirement
> sooner.  gary_poster: a lesson for us to learn is to not assume that
> internal customers will require any less effort to gather requirements
> than external customers.  benji: a way to gather requirements that might
> have helped us is to ask the customer, “please tell us what you imagine
> the ideal end state to be.”

I like that.

Anyhow, I regret the confusion, and the impact it's having on you
guys. I'm terribly excited by the prospects that this has for LP cycle
time - if we can get EC2 tamed, we're looking at < 4 hours from
reviewed->deployed, which is a fantastic step forward from 'sometime
tomorrow'.

-Rob