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

[Robin Jeffries]

Oh, for those of you who are interested in the bug, you can follow along by
subscribing to this bug

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/583379

<https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/583379>Robin

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 9:34 PM, Robin Jeffries <robin at jeffries.org> wrote:

> 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
>