[vtk-developers] Software Quality: Talking vs Walking

Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin jchris.fillionr at kitware.com
Fri Mar 8 15:18:28 EST 2013


+1000 :)

That is awesomee !


On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 11:26 AM, Bill Lorensen <bill.lorensen at gmail.com>wrote:

> On January 27, Sean McBride started an e-mail conversation about the
> state of VTK's dashboards. Although he initiated the conversion about
> frustration over gerrit recurring test failures, the conversation
> quickly moved to the state of VTK software quality.
>
> The following is a highly edited 15 reply e-mail discussion:
>
> SM: But with VTK, there's pretty much no build machine that's green,
>     and so the "*Tests failing*" section seems to be almost always a list
>     of false positives (wrt to the patch at hand).Could this email be
>     enhanced to divide the "*Tests failing*" section into 'newly failing'
>     vs 'still failing'?
>
> DC: We could write tests that pass.
>
> SM: That'd be nice too, but, practically speaking, given the state of
>        the VTK dashboard over the years, I thought my suggestion might be
>        easier, and of course not mutually exclusive to yours
>
> DC: Granted. But it sure would be nice to see it greened up once again
>
> MH: It would be easier to make them green than try to devise some
>        "baseline of failing tests".
>
> BL: The quality of vtk code continues to decline... Our vtk community
>        has lost the will to keep the toolkit at the high quality levels vtk
>        had in the past.
>        We should all be embarrassed.
>
> DG: Your statement that we test less than 1/2 of the code is false.
>        There are some dashboard machines (e.g. hythloth) cover much more.
> I
>        know that I'm being picky with semantics here, but the truth is, we
>        have so many failing tests that the dashboard isn't even able to
>        produce accurate code quality metrics.
>
> BL: I agree that there are so many failing tests that we have no idea
>       about the quality of vtk. In the past, we bragged about our
>       process. We cannot do that anymore.
>
> DG: Now the overall issue of developer participation in the code
>        quality process... that's a much bigger issue than the dashboard
>        alone.  Is it a mentorship issue, i.e. are new developers not being
>        taught the "ways of the source"?  Are there too many developers,
>        i.e. too many cats to herd?
>
> DM: So yeah, lets discuss how to and improve our processes, and all
>        chip in like the good team we are to clean up the dashboard. But no
> I
>        don't think that anyone should be ashamed of the state of things.
> -------------------------------------------
>
> "You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?"
>
> On January 27,
> Gerrit: 26 recurring failures
> Continuous: 12 recurring failures
> Nightly Expected: 0 green, 21 red dashboards
>
> Since January 27, the community started walking again.
> On March 7,
> Gerrit: 0 recurring failures
> Continuous: 0 recurring failures
> Nightly Expected: 21 green, 7 red
>
> --
> Unpaid intern in BillsBasement at noware dot com
>
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