Proposed dates for Fedora 19 image composes

[Adam Williamson]

Hi, folks. There was some discussion of this at the meeting on Monday, 
but no-one really gave much input, so I wanted to run these ideas by the 
list before we commit to them. Let's look at the image compose schedule 
for F19.

As things stand, the F19 calendar - 
http://fedorapeople.org/groups/schedule/f-19/f-19-quality-tasks.html - 
still has the Acceptance Test Plan milestones in it. As with F18, we 
should probably take most of these out: we agreed to replace them with 
TCs a couple of releases back, and that has been working out fine. We 
can keep one, pre-Alpha, for a quick 'sanity check' run - for someone to 
spin up a boot.iso and file whatever showstoppers it inevitably 
contains, just ahead of the TC date.

We should also drop the specific 'Test (milestone) Candidate' dates - we 
don't really schedule RCs, we simply start building them as soon as 
possible after the change deadline, once blocker bugs are addressed. The 
date serves no purpose.

So looking back at the schedule we wound up using for F17:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-November/104583.html

We pretty much went with 'three weeks between TC1 and Go/No-Go'. I think 
we should go with that again for F19. (We more or less did the same for 
F18, but I'm not sure we updated the official schedule, and we pretty 
much did wall-to-wall TCs from Beta till Final).

So here's what I'd propose as the dates for the F19 schedule:

Pre-Alpha Rawhide Acceptance Test Plan #1		Thu 2013-03-14
Test Alpha 'Test Compose' 				Tue 2013-03-19
Fedora 19 Alpha Go/No-Go Meeting (17:00 US Eastern) 	Wed 2013-04-10

Test Beta 'Test Compose' 				Tue 2013-04-23
Fedora 19 Beta Go/No-Go Meeting (17:00 US Eastern) 	Wed 2013-05-15

Test 'Final' Test Compose (TC) 				Tue 2013-05-28
Fedora 19 Final Go/No-Go Meeting (17:00 US Eastern) 	Tue 2013-06-18

The entries "Pre-Alpha Rawhide Acceptance Test Plan #2", "Pre-Alpha 
Rawhide Acceptance Test Plan #3", "Test Alpha Candidate", "Pre-Beta 
Acceptance Test Plan", "Test Beta Candidate", "Pre-RC Acceptance Test 
Plan" and "Test 'Final' RC" can be dropped.

As a side note for Jaroslav, there are some odd discrepancies between 
the wording of the Alpha and Beta entries and the wording of the Final 
entries.

This schedule would give us 13 days till the first TC, folks, so time to 
get those pre-validation-cycle changes in! Yes, I know I'm the worst 
offender here - I still have some major criteria changes that I _really_ 
need to finish up and propose this week.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net