[Test-Announce] Proven tester status

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2012-02-15 at 21:35 -0500, Vincent L. wrote:
> On 02/13/2012 09:30 PM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> > Note that statistics are still gathered and that future changes might depend
> > on whether or not proventesters do a better job than average of correctly
> > tagging builds as good or bad.
> 
> Probably stating the obvious, and I am new around here, but the biggest 
> challenge I see is that testing is not well defined.   Certainly for the 
> core items standard regressions or checklists of what items should be 
> validated etc do not seem to be present [ or at least i can't find any 
> ].   This naturally leads to inconsistent approaches to testing from 
> tester to tester.
> 
> There are a lot of packages, and likely a lack of staffing/volunteers to 
> develop and maintain testplans.   However as in most commercial release 
> management having these things would help ensure each tester validated 
> things in a similar fashion and ensure better release quality.

Yes, this is broadly the problem.

We have a system in place that allows you to create a test plan for a
package and have it show up in the update request. See it in action at
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-1766/dracut-016-1.fc17 - note the links to test cases - and details on how to actually set up the test cases to make this work are at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:SOP_package_test_plan_creation . We don't have test plans for many packages, really because of the resource issue. Jon Stanley did suggest he might work on this as his 'board advocacy' task.

> May I ask how many "proventesters" there are ballpark -vs- how many 
> approximate testers of standard status participate at any given time ?

We can say with precision how many proven testers there are, because
there's an associated FAS group - there are 90 members of the
'proventesters' group in FAS. Active non-proven testers is a bit harder
to count, but Luke can generate Bodhi statistics. There's one fairly
'famous' set from 2010 here:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-June/137413.html

There's a less famous report from March 2011 here:

http://lmacken.fedorapeople.org/bodhi-metrics-20110330

you can get some numbers from. At the time of the 2011 report it seems
like there was a roughly 1:10 proventester/regular tester ratio for F15
and F14, but it does seem to be slightly unclear.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net