[Ambassadors] Red Hat's investments (was Re: Going passive)

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 11/10/2010 03:54 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> Correct me if I'm wrong but it was not until Will start focusing on 
> AutoQA and James got brought in ( after Will had been busy doing other 
> things then paying attention to QA for quite some time ask him how often 
> I pinged him about that.. ) then a certain surge of employs starting to 
> appear started to appear after James ( before that he managed to get 
> some of his co-workers from within Red Hat from time to time to help 
> testing few things when we needed it ).

There was some reorganization done in QA, and James is responsible for
much of that, as well as of the growth after he took a more Fedora
centric role within QA.

I would say it is accurate that James is responsible for much of the
growth within Red Hat on Fedora QA, and not that it is because Will
"sold" AutoQA to anyone.

>> > * I pushed for Red Hat to hire Adam Williamson (formerly of Mandriva) to
>> > help grow Fedora QA/QE efforts, with a specific focus on building
>> > community QA/QE. I happen to think he's done a rather good job.
> Yes he has but did you consider James for that position at that time?
> ( I was a bit surprised that he did not get that position )

I was not directly involved in hiring for that position, so I couldn't
even begin to say whether he was considered or not. I knew of the
opening, I thought Adam would be a great fit for it, encouraged the
folks who were involved in hiring, and he has been incredibly valuable
for us since being hired.

>> > * I continue to ask Red Hat for additional resources to improve and
>> > accelerate Fedora QA initiatives. My management chain has encouraged this.
> Our time line seems to be different when did you start to encourage this?

Since I took the job as Fedora Engineering Manager, which was in January
of 2008.

> Give credit were credit is due those test days are originally mine and 
> James idea I even wanted to take it to the next level ( Daily test days 
> ) so I kinda should know as is the Fedora QA trac instance ( my idea 
> James pushed it through Jon Stanley set it up and thanked Will for some 
> reason ) along with How to debug stuff and general wiki improvements and 
> minor stuff here and there besides general testing and reporting..

I'm not trying to take credit away from you, just pointing out that
these good things are happening, and Red Hat is a major part of this reason.

>> > To your second point:
>> >
>> > "when they were making the 3 attempt to get triages up and running that
>> > it would not solve the underlying issue ( which it has not up today )"
>> >
>> > This is also false. Fedora 14 is the first release that we have hit our
>> > release target for. Ever. A big reason is the aggressive triaging work
>> > done during the post-beta process.
> The original idea of triaging was not to hit some scheduled deadline 
> perhaps it was somewhere down the list but it was not the main focus of 
> that time en fact I dont recall it to be there at all.

I disagree. When I bootstrapped triaging and helped establish the
initial set of criteria for what a blocker actually is around Fedora 10
(or 11), that was clearly the intention. John Poelstra and James Laska
and Adam Williamson (and all of the many many community volunteers) have
taken it from there and have improved upon it to what we have today,
where we released Fedora 14 on time.

Note, this is different from the "how do we deal with old bugs"
triaging, which I've not been involved with, and probably could use some
constructive suggestions for improvement (but is still better than
leaving old bugs open forever, which is what we did before).

~spot