[sakai2-tcc] [maint] Maintenance Branches: Enhancement vs Bug Merges

[Berg, Alan]

OK, my 5 cents worth. The lack of available man power for quickly testing is a significant generic concern. However, out of cycle testing is the way forward to distribute load on QA.
We should add a fourth tick box to a Jira asking for central QA testing, so that a filter can be applied and worked through out of cycle.

The sooner a patch is tested the cheaper the cost of repair. Waiting around for a specific point in the major tag cycle increases the risk of losing the knowledge in an organization during the wait period. I therefore think the balance of argument is in favor of shorter change cycles.  I would like to see a more aggressively shorted cycle approach for indie projects and hope resource issues diminish as good stuff gets in quicker. I see Beth's proposal as a positive step forward in that direction.

 > Perhaps an alternative is to turn over the maint branch to its
constituent users earlier than the release at which it becomes
"unsupported." This would certainly give more the interested
institutions and groups more freedom to do what they want.

New stuff get done in older versions with the risk of inconsistent patching of known issues.

Alan

Alan Berg
QA Director - The Sakai Foundation

Senior Developer / Quality Assurance
Group Education and Research Services
Central Computer Services
University of Amsterdam

http://home.uva.nl/a.m.berg

________________________________________
From: sakai2-tcc-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [sakai2-tcc-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] on behalf of Seth Theriault [slt at columbia.edu]
Sent: 03 January 2011 16:45
To: Beth Kirschner
Cc: sakai2-tcc at collab.sakaiproject.org Committee
Subject: Re: [sakai2-tcc] [maint] Maintenance Branches: Enhancement vs Bug Merges

On 1/3/11 10:09 AM, Beth Kirschner wrote:
> Happy New Year! The conversation on this thread died down
> weeks ago without a formal vote. The proposal is documented
> at:
> https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/TCC/Maintenance+Branch+Merge+Policy+%28tentative%29
>
>  I'd like to call for a vote...
>
> Thoughts?

I am still interested in what QA and RelMgmt have to say about
their ability to support the execution of this proposal. Even
though the "institution" doing the merging may be involved in the
testing, etc., there is no way that we can rely on it alone.

Perhaps an alternative is to turn over the maint branch to its
constituent users earlier than the release at which it becomes
"unsupported." This would certainly give more the interested
institutions and groups more freedom to do what they want.

Seth
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