Release quality Task Force :)

[marc]

I can offer, and iam pretty sure many others would do so too, to help getting better release quality by testing befor a new release.

Maybe this suggestion is a good point as a base for such a process.

a week until a new release will be published, dev team send an email with a download link to a prerelease package to registered "quality Task Force members".

This people will configure, build and update the new release in their testing environment and send in detailed problem reports back to dev team.

It should be possible by this process to get the major bugs sorted befor a release is tagged as stable and uploaded to download page.

Iam sure you guys (dev team) have lots of work to do and cannot test any feature on any platform but unfortunately this is a must for using zabbix in productive environment.

This is no critic in your doing guys, its just a suggestion because we are going in round ~5 in major developemnt (1=0.xalpha/beta, 1.0-stable, 1.1-stable, 1.4 stable, and now the way to 1.6) and should optimize processes to make zabbix more interesting for others.

If we want zabbix to be greater then nagios/big brothers we must work on the quality of our releases. this is a big advantage e.g. by nagios.

Regards,
Marc

[Alexei]

Thanks for your idea!

I'd like to share some information about our activities related to improvement of release procedure and quality of software in general:

We are introducing Developers section on www.zabbix.com later this week. It will contain nightly upload, daily pre-release distro and some other information which may be useful for early testers.

Our bug tracking system will be made publicly visible within next week. This would bring up-to-date information about current status and problems known to ZABBIX developers.

Yes, testing of ZABBIX on a various combinations and different versions of platforms, OS, database engines, local settings is a massive task. I would like to see ZABBIX community actively participating in this process. It won't eliminate all problems in official releases, however it would give us much more confidence that no major problems exist.

I do really believe that combination of the early testing with automated unit and regression testing will also help to bring ZABBIX to a different level of quality.

[marc]

Iam looking forward to contribute my part as community member.

[JonB]

Thats excellent news Alexei.

Jon

[monsieurcanard]

Awesome! Having all the bug reports in one place would be great.

Matt :-)

[mucknet]

Thanks for your idea!

I'd like to share some information about our activities related to improvement of release procedure and quality of software in general:

We are introducing Developers section on www.zabbix.com later this week. It will contain nightly upload, daily pre-release distro and some other information which may be useful for early testers.

Our bug tracking system will be made publicly visible within next week. This would bring up-to-date information about current status and problems known to ZABBIX developers.

Yes, testing of ZABBIX on a various combinations and different versions of platforms, OS, database engines, local settings is a massive task. I would like to see ZABBIX community actively participating in this process. It won't eliminate all problems in official releases, however it would give us much more confidence that no major problems exist.

I do really believe that combination of the early testing with automated unit and regression testing will also help to bring ZABBIX to a different level of quality.

Hi Alexei --

I see the developers section, any update on the bugs DB being available publicly? This would be an excellent step forward for this open source project.

If I'm blind, and just didn't see it, I appologize for asking dumb questions!

[Alexei]

Hi Alexei --

I see the developers section, any update on the bugs DB being available publicly? This would be an excellent step forward for this open source project.

If I'm blind, and just didn't see it, I appologize for asking dumb questions!

The software we used previously as internal bug tracking system, Eventum, didn't match all our expectations. Currently we are switching to other system.

Evaluation will take some time, at least two-three weeks.