As asked in today's release meeting, I'm starting a thread to continue
the discussion of how the development and release teams communicate and
work with the QA community. This was prompted by the recent changes
landing into quantal with little warning to most of the community.
During the meeting the nvidia/xorg change and the unity2d changes were
discussed. To the extent it's helpful in understanding the issues, I
will quickly discuss them. I just want to ensure we don't over-analyze
these incidents as they are intended to be examples only :-)
So quickly to give the example that was discussed in the meeting. Xorg
1.13 was pushed into quantal, causing anyone running the nvidia
proprietary drivers to no longer boot to a desktop (x crashes). This
caused alot of stress and grief on the part of those running qantal and
those testing quantal. I had no previous knowledge this was going to
occur, and certainly no one in our QA community did ether. It occurred
right before the weekend and the next week, I worked with popey and team
to setup some unity testing. To summarize life for the average qa
community member, here's what happened in order:
Unity2d is dropped, and unity may or may not be running anymore on my
hardware
Unity no longer works in a vm (due to no more unity2d)
Xorg breaks, rendering me unable to even boot into something like lxde
or xfce in the interim
I'm asked to help test unity and report bugs
Now clearly it's easy to see how the cards got stacked against them, and
in general they did not receive a good experience. To some of these
folks, me then asking them to help test is almost an insult, since there
ability to test has been severly hampered or removed.
Now, I want to be clear that I don't believe that the changes should or
should not have been done. That's a different discussion. Indeed, I
think the community would have reacted just fine had we done EXACTLY the
same thing, but simply told them in advance. If we're not communicating
with the community, we have a one-sided and abusive relationship.
Now, for part of this I assume responsibility for. For my part I have
been trying to pry more information out of the development teams on
what's happening and when and using that information to alert the folks
in the testing community. However, I am not always aware (and indeed as
the discussion today showed, the leads coming to the meeting are not
always aware) of changes that might impact everyone. I'd like us to
continue to be diligent in communicating to each other changes that will
be impactful.
The larger piece is how we might better communicate that information to
everyone. Some immediate ideas that came to mind are for me to funnel
information from the tech leads through the same outlets I do now for
things like testing events -- perhaps even on a weekly basis.. A bit of
a pulse of what's going on in development. This has been happening on an
ad-hoc and more limited basis so far this cycle. Going further, a
longer-term idea was integrating a package into the development release
to push out new information to anyone running it about what's going on.
Things like when important changes are landing and or when we want
testing. It would be helpful to push that out to everyone on the
desktop, with no requirements for them to "sign-up". Last UDS I
presented this idea roughly as an indicator that could be hooked into to
push out testing notifications. That same idea could be extended to push
general purpose information as well. Obviously that's a very rough idea,
but I'm curious to hear thoughts on the matter.
Now, in closing, the alternate images are likely to be officially
dropped at beta (as Steve shared today). This is a good chance next week
to try and be more proactive about communicating this change with
everyone. I plan to keep an eye out for Steve's thread on -devel (Steve
you pinging me when you drop it would be wonderful), and sharing with
everyone in the community in advance that the discussion (and outcome)
will be happening for beta. I think Steve mentioning it and then
following up to make sure it's communicated would be a wonderful change
and would help prevent future issues like what we encountered recently.
Other ideas / thoughts? I just want to make sure the QA community is a
well integrated and important part of the development process. This
discussion is part of making that happen.
Cheers,
Nicholas
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