Firmware Test Suite Release Cadence

FWTS will be released every two months when there are no critical issues and functions, released months with two exceptions, April and October, when features are locked for Ubuntu release.

Goals

This document is the proposal to a few changes of the fwts release cadence and the versioning scheme. The aim of the proposal is to make fwts more aligned to the Ubuntu release schedule and offer a simpler versioning.

Benefits

• Simple versioning
  • good for the advertisement and promotion to ODMs

  • indication to the maturity (at least a goal )

• Time-based Release
  • clear milestones from the perspective of project management.
  • bugs can be assigned to a milestone; clear and open to people outside of fwts team.
  • if the schedule is aligned to Ubuntu, it is possible for the distro QA to test fwts
    • cert. checkbox already uses fwts, we should think of the possibility if the distro checkbox will use fwts too in the future.

fwts-test verification stage

• As we are all not full-time on fwts, it is good to spread the workload over the 6-month development cycle.
• It is a hope that the team can focus on new feature developing on the first 3 releases, and focus on the QA on the last two, so
  • On the first 3 releases, there will be the fwts-test report with each, but it is not required to pass all of them for a qualified release.
  • On the last 2 releases, there will be the fwts-test verification stage before the release (as there is now). And it is required to pass all of them for a qualified release.

Versioning

• It is decided to align the version with the Ubuntu release.

• The versioning scheme will be year.month.minor since the 13.10 development cycle

  • - refer to the table below

Time-based Release

• A time-based release cadence is adopted, all releases are outlined in https://launchpad.net/fwts/+series.

Release Note

• To provide the release note with at least the following 3 sections
  • new features
  • fixed bugs
  • known issues