Suggestion for the organization of QA work

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>]

Hi,

I'd like to hear your opinion on the following proposal:

Currently QA works the way that people find something to do themselves and
everyone works for himself at the tasks he sees. I propose to change this
to define tasks of QA work with usually 2-3 people responsible for each
area.  These people responsible can do the work either themselves or by
organizing that it gets done (e.g. by organizing bug-squashing parties).

advantages:
- it's clear who's responsible for what
- it's more easy to find other people helping (I remember that sometimes
  people come that say they are interested in QA work) when you can say
  "We are looking for someone to help with xyz."


A first proposal for tasks:

- fixing bugs
  * try to fix bugs (especially RC bugs (but not limited to RC bugs!))
    e.g. via bug-sqaushing parties
  * find MIA maintainers (could be separated out, but my experience is
    that you find most MIA maintainers when going through bugs)

- send bug reports for uninstallable packages, unsatisfied
  recommends/suggests and priority problems in unstable
  * the problems are listed at [1]

- problems with testing
  * e.g. find problems why packages don't go into testing
    (there are sometimes long dependencies that prevent a package from
     getting into testing; it seems that some big library updates are
     nearly impossible without manual interaction)

- failed builds
  * on some archs there aren't enough people to go through all logs of
    failed builds to check whether they are problems in the autobuilder or
    to send bug reports

- WNPP
  * maintain the WNPP bugs and the orphaned packages


I'd like to hear your opinion on:
1. the proposal
2. my suggestion of the tasks (e.g. did I miss tasks?)


cu
Adrian

[1] http://qa.debian.org/debcheck.php


-- 

Get my GPG key: finger bunk@debian.org | gpg --import

Fingerprint: B29C E71E FE19 6755 5C8A  84D4 99FC EA98 4F12 B400