QA logbook
Martin (Joey) Schulze and I were talking on IRC about how to make QA
work more public. Joey was looking for something he could report in DWN
about QA's progress and the progress of the release, partly because good
QA is something the project should be talking about, partly to help get
new people interested and generally improve and speed up QA, and partly
because seeing progress is a good way to improve morale (at least I know
it's good when I can see my bug count go down).
As an example, I've always been quite impressed by the Mozilla project's
status reports (http://www.mozilla.org/status/). Now, you can tell most
of the people reporting things there are probably getting paid to do it,
and I wouldn't expect Debian reports to have quite such a "corporately
structured" feel. On the other hand, it's fascinating as an outsider to
look in and see "wow, all this stuff got done this week", and I'm sure
it's good for the people submitting reports to be able to see
acknowledgements of what they've done. Debian QA could especially
benefit from this since some parts of QA work feel a bit anonymous - you
don't have the direct feedback of your maintainer bug count dropping.
I think it would be useful to keep an informal log of what QA do on a
day-to-day basis. The implementation details aren't too important for
now, but they could be anything from a world-writeable file on pandora
through an editable weblog to something kept in CVS somewhere. Joey
could then use that in DWN or we could use it on the QA web pages.
The sort of things we might want to report on could be:
* "fixed/downgraded n bugs in the base system"
* "triaged a ton of bug reports, worked out they don't affect woody"
* "moved all QA packages to packages@qa"
* "fixed 30 bugs in orphaned packages"
* "look at the RC bug graph dropping like a stone! [link]"
Adrian's task list might be a good place to start.
What do people think about this? Would you use such a log if it were
available? Do you like the idea of publicly talking about QA's progress?
What would be the most convenient way to implement this?
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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