Author: intrigeri Date: To: Tails developers CC: Tails CI team Subject: [Tails-dev] [Experiment] New development process for our automated
test suite
Hi,
anonym and I are deep in a much needed process of reorganizing how we
work together.
As part of this, we are starting an experiment: anonym will now feel
free to push directly to our base branches (stable, testing and devel)
changes that affect only our automated test suite. He will "own" this
part of our Git tree and be responsible for any regression
he introduces.
anonym will only push minor robustness improvements to the stable
branch though, so that we take extremely little risk of finding that
branch in a worse state than during the previous release process, in
case we have to put out an emergency release.
I will review all these changes in batch about a week before the
freeze (for major releases) / before the release (for bugfix
releases), so there's time to fix or revert them if needed.
Regarding how we track test suite issues on Redmine: in the last
2 years we've accumulated dozens of byte-size tickets. They're all
technically valid (I think) but this super-fine-grained approach does
not really work for anonym currently, e.g. the mere number of tickets
feels overwhelming, the little value brought by fixing one such ticket
is not motivating; more generally this fine-grained approach is better
suited for a project that's working well except a few issues, which is
not exactly the current state of our test suite: it has some
fundamental problems that often requires zooming-out and approaching
things more radically. So, for a while anonym will mostly ignore all
these tiny tickets and will try to find a different level of
granularity that helps him better organize his work.
I can't overstate it: this is an experiment. We will monitor closely
how it goes, if it brings us the benefits we are looking for, if the
issues it creates are worth it. We can, and probably will, adjust the
rules & processes as we go. If you are affected by this new process in
any way, we will want to hear your feedback (the earlier and the more
honest, the better :)
