lubuntu-qa team mailing list archive

[Phill Whiteside <PhillW@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Lars,

/start of party political broadcast on behalf of the Cadence party.

The request to change to cadence testing came from the dev / release team.
The current Alpha release system has a fundamental flaw. Once frozen, only
critical bug updates can trigger a respin. Other bugs are held back until
after the 'release' date. Spending time & energy on deciding what is a
critical bug requiring a respin and what are 'opportunity' targets for "If
we do a respin, please include these bug fixes" is not serving us. I've
seen the frustration creep in, simply because of the correctly held belief
that

 It is important that the person who raised the bug, no matter if it is
incomplete, a duplicate or any other reason is made to feel that their bug
is important. Simply put, to them, it is the most important bug in the
world and should be treated as such.

With the switch to cadence, this 'holding back' of "minor" bug fixes is
removed in one foul swoop. The bug has a fix & it is incorporated. One such
advantage is that should an ISO be over sized for CD, Julien (or the
release team) can go in and trim it - the next spin will then be CD sized.
This is important for us on Lubuntu.

Having the release team not spend time (and quite a lot of it) on deciding
what warrants a respin is time better better spent on fixing stuff! Cadence
testing gives each flavour much more flexibility. For 12.10, some flavours
decided not to issue alphas, we stuck by them at a human cost to our
testers who were being asked to do a weeks worth of testing in 2 -3 days.
For Beta and RC, this can be sustained as there is the 'adreneline' rush to
'Get it done'. This is not stress that you guys should be under early in
the cycle.

It will be interesting to see what the other flavours decide upon. But I
certainly do not want to be told that "That bug fix cannot be added because
whilst it works, it does not warrant a respin of a frozen in time iso"
which is why I think that having the resources Ubuntu 'main' has, having
trialed it and moving to it does make sense!

This switch to cadence has moved far faster than expected (I quote from
Nicholas), I reckon it was sort of... well we'll do it for 13.10... But,
it's here for 13.04. Us 'old dogs' will bitch / moan / reflect to the 'good
old days' and then learn the system. It is, by a wide margin, a massive
improvement on what we had.

For people dipping their toes into testing for the 1st time, the system is
geared up. Bugs are now carried forward instead of vanishing at each
respin, 'tested' will be carried forward. The general user friendly stuff
for iso-tracker has had a shed load of work done on it, let us use these
new tools!

/end of party political broadcast on behalf of the Cadence party.

Regards,

Phill.

On 31 October 2012 19:39, Lars Noodén <lars.nooden@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> My vote would be to keep the alphas.  On one level it is useful to
> have a milestone to provide a sense of progress and accomplishment.
> More practically, it provides a milestone where we are likely to be
> able to invite in additional more casual testers.  Alpha has a little
> more weight to it to an outsider than the usual dailiy spin.  It also
> provides a deadline to meet as the product matures towards release.
>
> Regards,
> /Lars
>
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