I don't know if a similar thing has been talked about before but I thought I'd just throws this out there. The ultimate way to ensure quality is that we have unit test and integration test coverage on all functionality. That way somebody authors some code, commits to, for example, 4.2, but then when we release 4.3, 4.4, etc they aren't on the hook to manually tests the functionality with each release. The obvious nature of a community project is that people come and go. If a contributor wants to ensure the long term viability of the component, they should ensure that there are unit+integration tests.
Now, for whatever reason whether good or bad, it's not always possible to have full integration tests. I don't want to throw down the gamut and say everything must have coverage because that will mean some useful code/feature will not get in because of some coverage wasn't possible at the time. What I propose is that for every feature or function we put it in a tier of what is the quality of it (very similar to how OpenStack qualifies their hypervisor integration). Tier A means unit test and integration test coverage gates the release. Tier B means unit test coverage gates the release. Tier C mean who knows, it compiled. We can go through and classify the components and then as a community we can try to get as much into Tier A as possible. Darren
