All changelists should have TEST= BUG=
if at all feasible. Why? TEST= will ensure that testers get the information they need to cover your change. What needs to be tested is not always obvious from the CL description. Sometimes a change in base/ can impact the installer or downloads. Help the test team find bugs early by providing hints in a TEST= line. A good recent example is jam's change 14137: "TEST=added regression tests, but testers please confirm plugins on top video sites are placed correctly." BUG= also helps out testers, but it also enforces the practice of filing bugs for non-trivial changes. There should be a bug for any work that requires more than a few hours' effort. This lets us track everything that needs to be done to ship, it gives us a place to capture discussions of changes, and it lets us track the status of a change *past* the checkin. (Without a bug, we can't track things like 'testing verified that this works' or 'this caused a regression and needs more work' or 'this landed on the branch for Stable release X' or ''this other bug was fixed by the fix to bug Y.') I really want the entire team to get in the habit of tracking what needs to be done with bugs. It helps planning and targeting what needs to get done to get to a release milestone. It also helps testing to determine what changes to verify or to comment on side-effects a change might have had. I know that there are some cases where filing a bug seems like silly overhead. I just asked sidchat@ to file a bug for adding a new spell check dictionary. It will take more time for him to file a bug than it will to make the code change. Nevertheless, the bug will also save a lot of time for other people in the work flow from checkin to release by providing a place to track, verify, and comment on changes. A good rule of thumb is "if it needs code review, it probably should have a bug and test." Obviously, you don't need a bug to check in a build fix, change DEPS, make non-functional changes (eg, src/chrome/VERSION), or change only tests. It's a judgment call, and I trust your judgment. I just want to encourage you to help the people downstream of your changes (testers, release managers, engineers fixing bugs 6 months from now) by including a BUG and making TEST notes. Thanks, Mark --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Chromium Developers mailing list: [email protected] View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
