Hi folks! We're running a FUDCon NA workshop session today to try and actually knock out some QA 'low-hanging fruit', and the one we tried to deal with this morning is the blocker tracker bug names. We had some grand ideas for making this even better in the glorious future, which involve more good stuff in the blocker webapp, but we intentionally restricted ourselves to the scope of changes we could propose and implement quickly, for concrete improvements in the Fedora 19 cycle. This is an issue that's come up repeatedly in the past and was also came up during the talk Tim gave on the blocker process on Friday: the feedback from everyone at the meeting (QA people and non-QA people) was that the current names were really bad and confusing. So we're definitely addressing a need here. What we (Tim, John Dulaney and myself are here) came up with is a simple renaming of the aliases for the blocker / NTH tracker bugs and the whiteboard fields used to track proposed/accepted state, proposed by Tim, that addresses a lot of the problems that just about everyone has noticed with the current names: * The word 'accepted' is used in two different contexts in the same process, which confuses everyone * The format of the aliases is consistent for Alpha and Beta but not for Final, so you can't just remember them simply * 'Nice to have' is a confusing term - it makes sense from the perspective of a person sitting in a blocker meeting, but it's confusing in other contexts, and not clear what it really means We also noted as a problem that 'it's not obvious to someone who doesn't know the process that a proposed blocker is only proposed, not accepted' but came to the conclusion that this is not fixable within the narrow scope we set for this proposal - to fix that we'd have to have more tracker bugs, or the system Tim's working on for tracking blocker state outside of Bugzilla. The proposal is this: fXXalpha fXXalpha-freezebreak fXXbeta fXXbeta-freezebreak fXXfinal fXXfinal-freezebreak acceptedblocker acceptedfb This could be 'camel cased' (mixed upper and lower case) as the old names were, or not - camel casing makes the separate words clearer, but makes people think the case is important, which it really isn't (Bugzilla is case-insensitive in actually handling aliases; marking a bug as blocking 'f18alpha' works fine, for instance, you don't have to type 'F18Alpha'). It's not hugely important either way. There are really just two changes here: make final consistent with alpha and beta, so that the phase name is in the aliases, and use 'freezebreak' / 'fb' instead of 'accepted' / 'NTH'. The word 'freezebreak' is clear and unambiguous and, as a bonus, functionally descriptive: the whole purpose of this process is to track and review freeze breaks. That change also means we are not using the word 'accepted' in the alias names any more. Putting the phase name into the aliases for Final is a break with tradition (back in the mists of time before Alpha and Beta blockers were really tracked and before the NTH/freezebreak process existed, we just had a single bug named 'FXBlocker' for each release), but it makes the names consistent and hence memorable - right now people always get tripped up trying to do a simple 'if it's X for Beta it must be Y for Final' operation. The nice thing about aliases is that a bug can have multiple aliases, so our proposal is that we edit the bugs for F19 to have both the 'old' and 'proposed new' aliases, and started using 'acceptedfb' instead of 'acceptednth'. We try and get used to using the new names in blocker meetings, casual discussion etc. Then, if all goes well, we just have the new names for F20. We would also have to edit the relevant SOP pages to reflect the new nomenclature, obviously, but that's pretty much a search/replace substitution and doesn't need to be drafted and proposed separately - if this proposal is accepted, I'll just go ahead and make the appropriate wiki edits. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- test mailing list test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
