RegressionTracking

Revision 8 as of 2008-09-10 11:48:31

Clear message

DRAFT: Procedure will be announced to the QA and dev teams when wrinkles have been worked out.

Starting with Intrepid we will start tracking regressions between releases. Regressions make for a poor user experience and therefore often count as release blockers. Even when we decide it is unavoidable to ship with a known regression we should document it clearly.

Regressions will be marked on the Launchpad bug with one of 3 tags:

  • regression-potential - A bug discovered in the development release that was not present in the stable release. If it is significant, it should also have a task added under the ubuntu-release-notes launchpad project to be tracked for inclusion in the release notes.

  • regression-release - A regression in a new stable release. This may be a bug in a single package or functionality lost when changing the default application.

  • regression-update - A regression introduced by an updated package in the stable release.

Regression data template

It is important to use this exact template so we can programatically extract the information.

== Regression details ==
Discovered in version:
Last known good version:

Example bugs

TBD.

Tracking

In addition to the tag search views in Launchpad itself, the regression tags will be monitored at regressions.qa.ubuntu.com in a view similar to http://people.ubuntu.com/~sbeattie/sru_todo.html this SRU tracking page. There will also be an archive view.

Special case tags

Some teams may want to track a certain type of regressions that do not fit into the scheme described here. An example is the recent move from the 2.6.26 to 2.6.27 kernel fairly late in the Intrepid cycle. In this case the kernel team was esp. interested in regressions from .26 to .27, tagging them https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.tag=regression-2.6.27 regression-2.6.27. These may not fit neatly into the tracking scheme described here (in this case a 2.6.26 was not shipped in a stable release so a regression from .26 to .27 is not actually a distro regression unless it also worked in 2.6.24), but we can still include such special cases on the tracking page.

Future development

Regression tracking should eventually become a Launchpad feature.

Comments

  • [Leann] - I don't think it will be necessary to tag bugs regression-fixed. The reason is that regressions should have already been tagged regression-*. Once a bug with a regression-* tag has a status change to "Fix Released" that should indicate the regression has been fixed.

  • [Brian] - I agree with Leann here
  • [Steve] - That makes sense. Should only bugs in main be nominated to the ubuntu-release-notes project, as well as requiring some level of severity (high?)?
  • [Leann] - Yes, I agree there should be a criteria in order to make the release notes - otherwise that section would likely become quite bloated and not as helpful. What Steve has described above seems fine. Should we also maybe take into consideration the number of subscribers or duplicates the bug has?
  • [Henrik] - I've removed the regression-fixed item