lubuntu-qa team mailing list archive

[Phill Whiteside <PhillW@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Lance,

amongst many things that have been discussed is the 'burn-out' of testers.
One of the things that I 'squealed' about was the asking the testers to do
a weeks' worth of testing in 2 - 3 days (Or, if we take the final RC just
36 hours). Whilst we hope that such a fraknestorm will not hit 13.04 it was
quite apparent that the testers were being squeezed into an ever shrinking
time window.

The milestones 'should' have been released on Friday for testing to finish
the following Thursday. I don't need to tell you guys that this pretty much
never happened, yet the Thursday deadline was never changed. Quite simply,
this was an idiotic way of doing things.

With the new testing system, we use a 'daily' one every two weeks and peck
it to death for 7 days. During this 7 days of testing, said image will get
bug fixes. In terms of that it is like re-spins that happen during a
milestone release. The massive (IMHO) difference is that with the new
testing system the testers (your good selves) get pre-warned about
something being added / major change / new feature etc. and thus know where
to go test. The cadence iso will be still be re-spun each day and with the
change made during 'Q' cycle, the iso-tracker can now alert people to known
bugs and their status.

I'm terrible at trying to explain this as we're all used to Dailies &
Milestones... We have to forget that system until we hit the Beta release
(only one of them) and the RC.

Let me try :)

Each day, the system will generate a new iso with all the 'new' stuff in
it.
Every two weeks we will pluck that daily image and test it for a full 7
days until it gets fed up of being tested and agrees to pass all the tests.
During it's interrogation (oops testing) it is allowed to have a re-spin
for sins (oops.. bugs) that it has.

The mind step change is that yes, every two weeks we have a 'milestone'
release - The important difference is that:

It's not a milestone!
We have a guaranteed 7 days to test
It does not need all tests run & passed to continue.

Instead of all of us running around trying to test everything in a couple
of days, we can instead schedule our own work-load. This is where 'adopt an
iso' comes in. You can agree to carry out testing on iso i386 / AMD64/ PPC
etc. etc. you will be emailed when a respin has occurred but much more
importantly... you will be able to see on the wiki area WHY a respin has
occurred. This was only read by the few who actually logged onto the
EtherPAd - It will now be posted for all testers to see.

Honest Lance, I've been aware of cadence since 12.10 and am still getting
my head round it! It is a better system, it's just going to take a while
for us 'old dogs' to learn 'new tricks' :)

Please continue to ask questions, if I cannot answer them, I'll ask
Nicholas - after all, that's what he's there for!

Regards,

Phill.



On 30 October 2012 23:17, Lance <lbsolost@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> You're doing fine Phill :^)
>
> I'm just curious how this will all shake out for iso/upgrade testers.
>
> If they expect testers to devote every day, every other week to testing
> that's much more than most of us can handle ..... I'd think :^)
>
> Like at the end of the last cycle we almost got in a race, thank goodness
> Greg and others jumped up to the plate again. I did manage to pull off
> upgrade tests on both i386 and amd64, but I stumbled on iso testing due to
> a silly hardware problem.
>
> Suffice it to say that testing can be quite a challenge and the last thing
> we'd want to do is discourage testers from participating.
>
> Lance
>
> --- On *Tue, 10/30/12, Phill Whiteside <PhillW@xxxxxxxxxx>* wrote:
>
>
> From: Phill Whiteside <PhillW@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [Lubuntu-qa] Dropping Alphas for raring cycle
> To: "Lance" <lbsolost@xxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: lubuntu-qa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Julien Lavergne" <gilir@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 5:43 PM
>
>
> Hi Lance,
>
> I hope my earlier email made sense of the discussion that was do we do Sun
> --> Sat *OR* Fri --> Thur
>
> Fri --> Thur won and that will be the cycle. I can only apologise for any
> confusion, the ether pad was a discussion area for the session and did not
> include all that was decided.
>
> I'm trying to keep you guys in the loop, as it is quite critical what is
> being decided - some times the written word is not as fast as the spoken
> word in a session!
>
> Regards,
>
> Phill.
>
> On 30 October 2012 22:14, Lance <lbsolost@xxxxxxxxx<http://mc/compose?to=lbsolost@xxxxxxxxx>
> > wrote:
>
> I forwarded a copy of this to my daughter and her thought was that "Sunday
> - Saturday/Friday - Thursday" would be better defined by saying:
>
> Sunday -> Saturday
> Friday -> Thurday
>
> Either way, if that is correct, do they expect each iso/upgrade tester to
> test every day of that cycle?
>
> If so it's a major overload and I think that type of test cycle will only
> serve to discourage volunteer testing :^(
>
> Lance
>
> --- On *Tue, 10/30/12, Lance <lbsolost@xxxxxxxxx<http://mc/compose?to=lbsolost@xxxxxxxxx>
> >* wrote:
>
>
> From: Lance <lbsolost@xxxxxxxxx <http://mc/compose?to=lbsolost@xxxxxxxxx>>
>
> Subject: Re: [Lubuntu-qa] Dropping Alphas for raring cycle
> To: lubuntu-qa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<http://mc/compose?to=lubuntu-qa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> "Phill Whiteside" <PhillW@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: "Julien Lavergne" <gilir@xxxxxxxxxx<http://mc/compose?to=gilir@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> Date: Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 4:08 PM
>
>
> My thoughts on this are largely positive. When I look at the linked doc I
> see Nicholas addressed a couple of my concerns:
>
> # stability -- non-developer centric scheduling and testing; code was
> caught in an untestable state during planned testing
>
> # Should we target specific packages for testing inclusion as part of
> cadence weeks?
>
> That said I'm not entirely sure what the test cycle is going to be other
> than "every two weeks" during what we'd previously called "alpha". I'm not
> the brightest bulb on the tree and referring to "Sunday - Saturday/Friday -
> Thursday" is a bit confusing to me :^)
>
> Somewhat off-topic but it was mentioned in a previous message that some
> installation test-cases were changing. I think that's great!
>
> I've never used LVM or full disk encryption but we'd long neglected the
> upgrade/reinstall via live CD/DVD/USB options which I've actually found to
> be a truly great option since Maverick ;^)
>
> I just hope they keep Nicholas where he is! He seems to listen and he's
> open to change when and where change is needed.
>
> Lance
>
> PS: I've been doing some Precise 'abiword' testing:
>
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2074321
>
> Julien came to the rescue but i need a few more days to figure out a few
> things because we have to consider potential effects on all of the other
> flavors ;^)
>
> --- On *Tue, 10/30/12, Phill Whiteside <PhillW@xxxxxxxxxx>* wrote:
>
>
> From: Phill Whiteside <PhillW@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [Lubuntu-qa] Dropping Alphas for raring cycle
> To: lubuntu-qa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<http://mc/compose?to=lubuntu-qa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: "Julien Lavergne" <gilir@xxxxxxxxxx<http://mc/compose?to=gilir@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> Date: Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 12:54 PM
>
> Hi folks,
>
> apologies for the zero notice on this, I was part way through drafting
> something up when I got distracted over our test-cases!
>
> I've attached the ether-pad (in html format to preserve the links) which
> has the various links on it for Cadence testing. It was agreed that we will
> do Fri - Thur testing instead of Sun - Sat in order not to split a weekend
> up.
>
> To surmise, cadence testing will last for 7 days and be carried out
> fortnightly - as you can see from the attached document, Nicholas has some
> tasks to carry out to ready the wiki area for the calendar / reporting etc.
> It makes good sense for us to follow what 'main' Ubuntu are doing in terms
> of testing time tables and with cadence we do not have the mad scurry to
> get milestone releases out early in the cycle. During cadence the daily
> images will continue to be built and simply replace the cadence version on
> the iso tracker - So, it will be important to zsync before doing testing.
>
> Cadence was 'beta' tested by Ubuntu in the 'Q' cycle and the lessons
> learned are to be applied for 'R'. If you good people who do the grunt work
> of the testing have any questions do please ask (and I'll go ask Nicholas
> :P ).
>
> Regards,
>
> Phill.
>
>
> On 30 October 2012 15:54, Julien Lavergne <gilir@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> As you may know, Alphas will be dropped for Ubuntu ISOs, and it's up to
> the flavors to decide if they want to keep the Alphas or not. Instead, it
> will be replace by a cadence testing, meaning we can be free to organize
> the daily testing, and only have Beta 1, Beta 2 and Final release with the
> classic process. Personnaly, I think it's a good idea, since Alpha are
> basicly a snapshot of the current developpement with a bit more testing.
>
> As you are the people who do the actual testing, what do you think about
> it ?
>
> Thanks in advance for your feedback.
>
> Regards,
> Julien Lavergne
>
>
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