Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Seth Alan Woolley <seth AT positivism.org>]

Meeting summary follows:

Part 1 (discussion of prometheus)
 * qa team needs an automated testing tool sooner rather than later
 * getting prometheus running shouldn't take more than a week or two
 * interested parties seemed to agree to get prometheus up and running
   and then re-assess directions to go with automated testing
 * work on the various parts of prometheus was divided amongst
   interested/capable parties:
   * dufflebunk will be making pm-autocast (the tcl/expect script) run again
   * swoolley will be working on the reporting script (pm-seer)
   * dmlb2000 will be working on making the remaining framework functional
     and researching some more experimental functionality
   * afrayedknot will, time permitting, make a few improvements to
     a few poorly written functions in pm-autocast

Part 2 (unscheduled discussion of grimoire qa process)

After the prometheus discussion came mostly to a close interested parties
discussed framework for a more concrete way to measure the quality of
the grimoire.

The rough outline of the proposed framework is as follows:
 * bugs may be mapped into one of several categories
 * some of these categories may be defined by a matrix of bug priority
   and severity, others defined by other qualities the bug may possess
   (eg, a regression). Great turmoil over the definitions of categories
   is expected.
 * Several tiers of spells exist:
   * tier 1: spells distributed on, or used in the production of the iso
   * tier 2: basesystem + extras as defined by ledger, the last stable
     release had 235 such spells. The size of this tier is proportional
     to the resources availible for qa testing.
   * tier 3: everything else
  * A separate matrix to map spells in a given tier to number of bugs
    in a given category would exist.
  * The numbers are currently undecided upon, but may be based on
    realistic goals given the current status of the grimoire. Great
    turmoil over the number of bugs/tier/category is expected. Likely
    result is a compromise between: a realistic goal, a reasonable amount
    of stability, a reasonable release cycle length.
  * It is expected that tier 2 will increase over time and tier 3 will 
decrease
  * Similarly, the number of bugs/category/tier should decrease over time,
    thus indicating an increase in quality over time.
  * A bug review board may be formed to scrub bugs and ensure they are
    properly categorized. The board would meet periodically (say
    once a week) Currently the proposed size of the board will be 7. 3
    developers, 3 users, and chaired by the qa lead to break tie votes. A
    proposal for 3 month terms on seats was proposed. No discussion of
    how people would be appointed occured.
  * proposed names for the group are "bug druids" and "bug monks"
  * some concern over the increased amount of work ensued. The conclusion
    is that the number of bugs to review is relatively small and once the
    backlog is cleared out the workload will be dramatically less. An
    alternative is to simply let bugs be categorized passively by the
    reporter, the developer that would be fixing the bug, the grimoire
    lead and the qa lead.

On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 10:12:04PM -0700, Seth Alan Woolley wrote:
> minutes here:
> 
> http://smgl.positivism.org:8080/files/smgl-prommie.txt Please add 
> comments to this thread.
> 
> On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 08:02:00PM -0700, Seth Alan Woolley wrote:
> > Anybody interested in discussing the fate of prometheus should join us 
> > in #sourcemage-quality on irc.freenode.net in six minutes.
> > 
> > 8 PM Pacific Standard Time.
> > 
> > The meeting will be logged for latecomers.
> > 
> > Seth

-- 
Seth Alan Woolley [seth at positivism.org], SPAM/UCE is unauthorized
Key id 00BA3AF3 = 8BE0 A72E A47E A92A 0737  F2FF 7A3F 6D3C 00BA 3AF3
Quality Assurance Team Leader; Security Team Member, Leader Emeritus
Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic http://www.sourcemage.org
Elected Coordinating Committee Member, Secretary, and Finances Chair
Pacific Green Party of Oregon - Peace - http://www.pacificgreens.org

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