Release Process concerns (QA) and suggestions

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:53:49 AM Stéphane Graber wrote:
> > - Let's document what constitutes a respin and what doesn't, so that
> > whenever we see a bug we all know if that is going to trigger a respin
> > or not, let's create guidelines for it.
> 
> I suppose we can do that, ultimately it's always going to be up to the
> release team to do a go/no-go on case by case basis, but writting some
> generic guidelines can't hurt.

I am personally a bit leary of attempting too much precision in this kind of 
documentation.  I don't recall a respin that I thought was a mistake or one 
that, if test timeline was seen as a potential issue, there wasn't discussions 
about the chances of getting retesting done in a timely manner.

If we try and be too specific about criteria then we're going to get rules 
lawyers complaining we didn't follow the criteria rather than applying common 
sense.  I see this happening with Feature Freeze exceptions, so I'm not 
concerned about this at random.  

As long as it's general guidelines to give a broad expectation about what's 
likely to happen, I think it's fine.  If it's seen as an exclusive list of 
conditions, then people will start to argue about if something matches the 
respin criteria list and not focus on if the respin makes sense.

Scott K