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

[Jason Cox]

All,

I have created a new checklist page for testing the bug on the wiki here
systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/checklist_specific_for_bug_583379. Robin,
let me know which items don't belong for this test, and I can remove them
from the list. I haven't created any lists yet, in case we are using the new
server for this.

As far as the actual tests go, information on the process can be found here
systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/how_to_test_things and here
systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/tests. A checklist is used (linked above)
to record the results of each test. There are several tests separated into
several categories. When we are ready for testing, we will figure out who
will do which test. Some tests only require one person, but some require a
few people to work together. For the multi-person tests, we will coordinate
with each other through IRC or gchat, send some emails, make changes, send
more emails, and keep each other informed on whether or not an email is
received.

Thanks for the interest in helping with testing Yian and Malveeka! Svaksha,
if you get back to a Linux box in time, you can help as well. :) When the
patched server is ready, we can coordinate a time to meet in IRC for
testing.

Thank You,

Jason Cox

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 12:34 AM, 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
>
>
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