Release-critical bug process?

[John Poelstra]

James Laska said the following on 02/09/2009 05:45 AM Pacific Time:
> On Mon, 2009-02-09 at 01:17 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/ReleaseCriteria
> 
> I'm of the mindset that QA should not solely define the release
> criteria.  Defining what a release should be must be a collaborative
> decision.  Perhaps the above link is something that each team provides
> *minimal* content for and FESCO reviews/approves?  QA can then taylor
> testing around what expectations the development teams are setting along
> with the approved release criteria.  Should all this data eventually
> land in each test plan as 'exit criteria'?
> 
> I'd love to see a world where each test team defines their exit criteria
> for testing.  I find it difficult to fill a single document with
> absolutes that properly apply to all levels of testing throughout the
> operating system.  Success for the Fingerprint feature will look much
> different than success for KDE4.2 and kernel.
> 
> That doesn't mean that QA cannot or should not be involved in deciding
> whether something blocks the release.  I wonder if the release blocking
> decision could be more collaborative?  
> 

I think this last part would be valuable.  I'd also like to see more 
discussion and notification from QA when a test or final release is 
deemed "ready to go"... at a minimum an email to fedora-test-list 
stating what has happened or been decided and who has made that 
decision.  I'm not advocating more "process", but more communication 
than an easily missed IRC conversation.

Nothing is worse than spending several hours triaging bugs to a blocker 
list only to find out that the blocker list isn't being used or that the 
release has been deemed "done enough" and has gone to the mirrors.  I 
know every bit helps, but it is still demoralizing.

John