[QA] Gerrit cleanup day - QA ramifications

[Greg Grossmeier]

<quote name="Legoktm" date="2015-08-19" time="18:10:34 -0700">
> On 08/19/2015 04:52 PM, Greg Grossmeier wrote:
> > Hello all,
> > 
> > This is a heads up and discussion starter about the upcoming "Gerrit
> > Cleanup Day" (see: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88531).
> 
> Is it too late to rename it to DDoS jenkins day? ;-)

:)

> 
> > tl;dr: On Wed Sept. 23rd there will be a concerted effort to reduce the
> > backlog of open patchsets in Gerrit (by reviewing and/or merging them,
> > as appropriate). What does this mean for us, those who care about
> > quality and site stability?
> 
> Everyone should care about quality and site stability, and if they
> don't, they shouldn't be +2'ing patches.

You're right, I phrased that incorrectly. I should have said: "what do
those on this quality focused mailing list think?" :)

> 
> > What can we do as a group to ensure that all of the code that does get
> > merged during this day doesn't significantly reduce the quality of our
> > codebase? A site outage the following week would be A Bad Thing(TM).
> 
> * Make sure people do not override jenkins when it starts randomly
> failing due to disks filling up or being overloaded resulting in timeouts
> * Make sure people aren't merging patches that don't have tests in areas
> where it isn't totally impossible to write tests

Those are really good points. In fact, that might be how some of the
people in WMF RelEng, who might not have the needed experience to merge
the big backlog of MW-related changes spend a portion of their time:
helping people with issues that come up in CI (not that we wouldn't
normally).

> 
> > Two basic response:
> > 1) do nothing out of the ordinary (iow: trust our current processes)
> 
> Probably this. It's just like a remote hackathon I guess.

Word.

Greg

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