F17 QA schedule modification proposal

[Robyn Bergeron]

On 12/05/2011 11:43 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-12-05 at 11:34 -0700, Robyn Bergeron wrote:
>> On 11/29/2011 04:01 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
>>> Hi, Robyn. As discussed on the test list this week and at our meeting,
>>> we'd like to propose the schedule modification described in
>>> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-November/104583.html
>>> to the F17 QA schedule. Could you put that in there? Thanks!
>> Sorry - this mail got filtered in ways that are all sorts of wrong. :(
>>
>> My only concern with the schedule as proposed is that we are essentially
>> doing the Alpha Test Compose prior to Feature Freeze, which is the point
>> where features should be testable. I've popped in the existing dates
>> below, but I just want to point out that I think we know from past
>> experience that a lot of features don't hit their feature freeze
>> deadline until *on the actual deadline*, which means that we are
>> essentially testing a compose of stuff a full week before I expect
>> people to finish procrastinating and getting their stuff done.  We still
>> have the actual release candidate after that, but I don't want us to
>> basically pull in a date and find out that it's not helpful because all
>> the breaking pieces get pulled in/finished after the test compose date.
>>
>> Pre-Alpha Rawhide Acceptance Test Plan #1    2012-01-19
>> Feature Submission Deadline		     2012-01-24	
>> Pre-Alpha Rawhide Acceptance Test Plan #2    2012-01-26
>> Test Alpha 'Test Compose'                    2012-01-31
>> Feature Freeze (Testable|Complete)	     2012-02-07
>> Fedora 17 Alpha Go/No-Go Meeting             2012-02-22
>>
>> Test Beta 'Test Compose'                     2012-03-06
>> Fedora 17 Beta Go/No-Go Meeting              2012-03-28
>>
>> Test 'Final' Test Compose (TC)               2012-04-09
>> Fedora 17 Final Go/No-Go Meeting             2012-05-01
>>
>>
>> Or it's possible that I'm nuts and it's not worth worrying over.  :)  We
>> do the Test Compose for Beta a week before Features are required to be
>> at 100%, but of course, they should already be testable/complete at
>> alpha, so the breakage scenario in Beta is far smaller, theoretically.
> I think in practice it's not such a huge deal. As far as release
> validation goes we just don't really *care* about the feature process
> very much.
>
> The main thing a TC achieves for us is to give us a sanity check on the
> compose process - can we actually compose a full set of images at this
> time, are they crazily over-size, etc - and the ability to start
> identifying blocker bugs. I just don't see that it's actually a problem
> if the TCs contain features that are incomplete, or if some feature
> lands in TC3 that wasn't in TC1. All the work we did identifying
> blockers in TC1 is still likely to be of value, and even if TC3
> introduces some new blocker, we haven't *lost* anything.
Hey,

So I've been ... afflicted with "the travel plague" (where I travel) and 
also "the death plague" (where I've been wanting to die). I haven't 
forgotten about this - I just pulled it up to make the new mods, but I 
need to talk to Dennis and make sure he's kosher with pulling back the 
Compose dates a week, particularly the Alpha (since the date the Alpha 
Compose would move to, 2/7, is also the date of dropping orphans and 
branching from rawhide, which sounds like it might be a busy day.)

Dennis, what say ye? Is that doable or not for any particular reason?

-Robyn

-Robyn