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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]" * "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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
