[Test-Announce] Fedora 16 Final Release Declared GOLD!

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2011-11-03 at 23:17 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:

> > Hopefully we'll try to figure out why so much heroic effort was needed
> > to keep from slipping any further than we did. That kind of thing tends
> > to burn people out and we don't want it happen regularly.
> 
> I think it boils down almost entirely to the big behaviour changes in
> anaconda in F16, which unfortunately suggests F17 may also be a tricky
> cycle, with the UI rewrite (and possible btrfs adoption). anaconda
> provides a disproportionately high number of blockers, and the
> bootloader and disk label changes in F16 caused change (and hence bugs,
> change _always_ means bugs) in lots of paths we've simply not had to
> worry about for a long time. All the issues with bootloader installation
> on upgrade, BIOS boot partitions and so on are quite simply things we've
> never previously had to deal with at all.

Forgot a couple more factors: I think we're doing more testing and with
higher standards than we have before. The matrices have grown - not
useless growth but we're just covering more things that really ought to
be covered - and use scenarios have gotten more complex over time: quite
a few bugs this time related to the use of DVD / netinst images written
to USB, which we used to consider a pretty minority pursuit but is now
pretty mainstream, for example.

And Red Hat's paid Fedora QA team is two people short of where we ought
to be: jlaska and rhe both moved on, and we didn't hire direct
replacements yet. Both of them certainly contributed a lot to release
testing in the past, obviously, so all that load has had to be spread
out.

So to summarize: we're testing more, to higher standards, on a release
that had extremely disruptive changes, with fewer paid RH staff involved
than before. It was a bit of a perfect storm!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net