[maemo-developers] How to use extras-testing correctly?

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Wednesday 16 September 2009 13:15:59 Till Harbaum wrote:
> 1) don't update too often, so people/testers don't get bored
> 2) put some extensive internal testing before promoting something
>   to extras-testing

My conclusions are similar but maybe a little different.

I am not promoting GPE to extras-testing until I have done some testing in 
extras-devel.  But I am not waiting for the app to be of releasable quality 
before I promote it.   I have divided the problems I know about into 3 
categories:

1) things which have to be fixed before going into extras-testing as they 
either make the app non-functional or carry some risk for the tester (e.g. a 
bug preventing switching to another app)

2) things which are high priority to fix and will probably be commented on by 
testers but which do not prevent doing useful testing

3) things which may not be fixed for the first release

I will promote once all the problems in category 1 are fixed.

> This also means that i will delay the promotion of  osm2go as i am
> currently running my own tests.

So, I am delaying promotion until I think the application is (i) usable, and 
(ii) not putting testers at risk of major problems.  This involves some 
amount of both testing and bugfixing -- probably a delay of about a couple of 
weeks in my case.

> I somehow think this is not the way it should work ... Any ideas how to use
> it in a more efficient way?

I do share your concern about how the frequency of updates will work.  Once I 
promote, and people do some testing and find problems which I need to fix, 
how often do I update?  If I do it one-by-one for each report, testers may 
find themselves testing the same features several times in one week!  My plan 
is to try to update about once a week -- but that may mean quite slow 
progress.  

The bottom line is that we need to try to use the process and see how well it 
works.

Graham