Avoiding conditioning ignorance towards AutoQA

Tim Niemueller tim at niemueller.de
Wed Apr 27 12:32:52 UTC 2011


Hi fellow Fedorans.

Recently, AutoQA has been introduced to catch typical problems early in
the update process. In general, I appreciate that effort, but currently
I find myself in a phase of conditioning ignorance towards AutoQA,
essentially because it is drowning me in irrelevant information. The
current case why I'm writing is
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/lua-wsapi-1.3.4-4.fc15.

Here are two ideas to make AutoQA relevant, less time-consuming, and
more helpful. In short: good QA is always quiet, only if there is a
problem it communicates.

- Post only errors
It is common, for example, in automated build or continuous integration
systems to send out emails only on errors. Similar goes for Unix tools,
which tend to be quiet if everything is ok, and only bother you with
output if something is not. Therefore, I propose to have AutoQA messages
posted only in case that there has been an error.

- Accumulate error messages
An email is sent for every single comment to Bodhi. In the case of
AutoQA, it causes one email per platform. It increases the load of email
tremendously to deal with, which in turn makes me ignore it. Therefore,
I propose to accumulate messages for all platforms. Combined with the
earlier proposal, the states for all platforms should be collected by an
intermediate node, and if and only if a test failed on any of the
platforms, one message with all status messages is posted to the update.

On a related note: it'd be much appreciated if Bodhi would provide an
option to get a daily digest with all comments of all the packages I'm
involved with.

I hope the fine folks of the AutoQA effort take these proposals into
account when proceeding in the development of the system and help me to
stop ignorance from taking over.

Regards,
	Tim

-- 
    Tim Niemueller <tim at niemueller.de>      www.niemueller.de
=================================================================
 Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)


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