[Systers-dev] Urgent bug and need for a test cycle

[Robin Jeffries]

We've found an important bug that needs to be fixed ASAP.

A syster tried to access her mailman options page and caused mailman to die.
 Kanika vats and I did some poking around, and the problem is that she has
an email address in the dlist database with upper case characters.  That
didn't match the key we were searching on (which was all lower case), so we
couldn't find her record, and mailman summarily crashed (luckily mailman
does a great job of recovering from problems like this and restarts with
almost no side effects).

Kanika Vats is going to fix the problem (which apparently exists in several
places; we never noticed it before because it's currently not possible to
create a record with upper case letters in the email key, so none of our
testing exposed this. ) She's doing it, a) because she found the problem,
and b) because it is in the code she wrote last summer, though it looks like
the problem existed before her changes.  We will need to pull this over to
abiwt.org, our current testing machine, and run a mini test cycle on it, as
quickly as we can.  (Jen, are we still using abiwt.org for integration
testing, or should we be using the new machine?)

For the test cycle, I'm hoping that Jason, who is the mentor for our testing
project and Vidya, the student on that project, can use this as a chance to
learn how testing works now (so you really know what you are trying to
improve). We can take our current set of manual tests and pare this cycle
down to just the ones that access the dlist database, plus a couple that
test the core functionality (like the ability to send to the list).  I'm
happy to work with you two to figure out what those tests are.  (This could
get started now, so that we are ready to test when the code is done).

Then we will need folks from this list to help with the testing.  It's
probably only 4-5 hours work total, which, if we get lots of people, we can
get done with about 30 minutes of work on the part of each tester.
 Students, this will be a chance for you to learn about system testing,
which will serve you well this summer, plus you will learn more about how
mailman works, so I hope that all of you will participate.    I'll leave it
to Vidya and Jason to organize that when we get this far, which I hope will
be early next week.

We are also going to use this to try out a code review.  I was hoping to
have a bit more structure in place before doing it, but this gives me (as
code reviewer) and kanika vats (as person being reviewed) a chance to figure
out how to use the tools that launchpad provides.  We are going to expect
everyone to have their code reviewed regularly this summer, so I'll try to
be public about what we are learning, so that it will be easier for the rest
of you.

Thanks for your help on this.  It's always frustrating to have to do one of
these test cycles outside the ones we plan for the summer (and where we give
a lot more notice), but I think it turns out to be a great opportunity for
people to learn more about how things work here in a lightweight way.  I
appreciate everyone chipping in to make it go quickly and smoothly.

Robin