Well testing day is done. As someone that is fairly new to the day to day of the project it looked pretty successful to me.

[Robert Middleswarth]

I saw in IRC several people who didn't have redhat addresses testing the 
projects.  From what I have read this was an improvement over the 3.0 
testing day.

I submitted 2 bz reports and reported 3 other build related reports in IRC.

Despite the fact that it was suppose to be a community coordination what 
I saw was a never ending day for Mike Burns (mburns) and a few other 
people doing there best to get everything in place.

There were bugs being found but many of the bugs I was dealing with were 
packaging issues and not really software bugs.  Part of the issues I saw 
was the fact that the infrastructure wasn't in place to handle the 
testing day.  The repo was getting thrown together at the last min.  
Most of the packages were added into the repo the night before and there 
wasn't any time for testing.  There were even a few packages like the 
SDK and CLI that were not ready until half way thought the testing day.  
Because there just wasn't time to test there were missing packages and 
other issues that would likely have been caught if there had been a day 
or two for basic testing I am wonder how many more bugs would have been 
found if people hadn't been spending so much time getting the installs 
to work.

I have been though these kind of things with other projects and many of 
these kind of issue are normal especially in fairly young projects were 
all the infrastructure pieces aren't in place yet but many of these 
issues are pretty easy to fix.  Here are my suggests for things we need 
to get done over the next year.  Many of these things have been talked 
about before on this list and don't think any of these ideas are coming 
out of left field.  Now don't get me wrong I am willing to put the time 
in to help make these things happen not just asking other people to do 
the work.

1) Need to set a process for adding people onto the team.  Someone else 
besides me has offered to help with the infra but there doesn't seem to 
be a process to add people to the group.  It seems to be really to much 
work for the few people I see running things part time and it shows.

2) Linnode and EC2 are great to get things running quickly but they can 
also be pretty costly especially EC2.  We need to start looking into 
ways to save money at the same time giving the project more flexibility 
in testing and building.  There are several options for this but I 
always believe in the old saying that someone should always "eat your 
own dog food".  So an oVirt or a RHEV cluster should really be on the 
table.  If there isn't already a working group looking into this maybe 
there should be.  I will be happy to be a member of this group if the 
team decides this is a good idea.

3) We have to get the builds out of Jenkins and into usable repo's in an 
automated way this more then anything else will make basic testing of 
packages easier and I would guess half the bugs people were hitting 
during testing day would have been fixed long before testing day.  I 
know this is something being worked on by eedri but it really needs to 
be in place.  I would love to help work though the process.

4) We need to get at least el6 packages produced also I suggest we start 
supporting all supported Fedora builds (Right now that would be F16 and 
F17).  A Debian based system would also be great.  Having builds being 
ran on more then one os will help remove some of the only works on 
fedora XX issues that I am seeing in the code and commits.  There are 
also bugs that hide behind packages that show themselves rarely but 
become very shallow under other OS's.  I have seen that in other 
projects were code that seems to work great under one OS will start to 
bomb under others and so bugs that were masked get found and it forces 
the packaging to get more generic.

5)  We really need a review of the current structure of the websites and 
tweak it some as some resources are really hard to find.  Simple things 
like adding a top level menu for the wiki most projects have something 
like a documentation tab that points to a predefined wiki page with 
instructions and links to other parts of the wiki covering important 
topics..  Adding a simple URL like wiki.ovirt.org that redirects to 
www.ovirt.org/wiki .  There have been other idea's tossed out in the 
list many of them are good ideas and simple to do but unless someone 
really pushes them they tend to go no where.  Maybe an official 
suggesting list Editable by all and a todo list (editable by just infra 
team member) to help capture those idea's

6) As we see more people testing out the software we are going to get 
the same set of questions over and over again.  Lets face it how many 
times has someone emailed users about nfs storage problems.  For all 
projects there is always certain questions that get asked a lot.  
Example getting NFS working.  We really need to find a way to help 
people get answers before they start emailing the user list.  The 
requirements are always hard to get right.  We need to find something 
that the developers are willing to use well still keeping it simple 
enough that users wont just bypass or never check.

7) We all know visualization is the future and people are likely going 
to take ovirt engine and vdsm in interesting new ways.   we already see 
changing in the networking stack, glusterfs addon, major improvements in 
the UI.  There also seems to be a solid todo list that Red Hat is 
funding.  With all these great changes coming down the pike we are going 
to have to handle more and more complex build structure.  This one kinda 
ties in with #2.  We need the ability to spin up other build 
environments then just Fedora latest and RHEV that means we are going to 
have to bring in people who know Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc.

8) Look at ways to help members write blogs posts about ovirt and 
providing a way for people to find them.  Blog posts are great ways to 
work on new section of the documentation and/or get publicity for a new 
feature.  My first ovirt build wasn't based on the wiki but a getting 
started blog post by Jason Brooks.  There are always great topic idea 
out there.  Off the top of my head I can think of several topics.  These 
include things like how to use the glusterfs with oVirt, processor types 
and how to get the most out of clusters, Exporting a VM, Importing from 
VMware, Importing from Xen.  Those are just topics off the top of my 
head I am sure there are many more.  Personally I have never been a fan 
of planet.xxx sites but I personally have found using a wordpress mu and 
allowing people to post and let the good stuff float to the top of the 
sites really does well.  Granted we are not going to see a hundred 
articles a day but a place for people to post might make it easier for 
people to write blog posts and for other people to find them.

Well I fell like I am writing a book here and even with that I am sure 
there are things I have missed.

I want to make it clear I am not saying anything bad about the team and 
what has been done already I am just point out things that I fell this 
team should be working on to make the infrastructure behind this great 
project help the project not hinder it.

Thanks
Robert