[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Putting the community's QA money where our dev mouth is

[Dan Scott]

In the QA report for which several members of the community generously
paid $30,000, the "Moving Forward" section at
http://nox.esilibrary.com/~jason/qareport/qa.html#_moving_forward
states:

"We recommend that the development community start including integration
tests with their changes to the backend, and pgTAP tests with their
database changes (there was discussion and general interest in this
during a developers meeting)."

The referenced developer meeting is minuted at
http://evergreen-ils.org/meetings/evergreen/2013/evergreen.2013-08-27-14.04.html
with the agreement "general interest in easing into qa practices
demonstrated by phasefx, phasefx to hold hands with everyone, especially
through the mailing list"

I'm concerned that since then we have seen a number of database changes
without corresponding pgTAP tests (the most recent pgTAP test was
committed Sept 3rd, while there were a ton of changes committed through
October). I did bring this up in the IRC channel with respect to one of
the recent bug fixes that was committed for a fairly fundamental
function, but my gentle prod in that case appears to have been
overlooked.

I recognize there is pressure to get the 2.5 release out, but if we
continue to follow our past approach of not including unit tests where
the path has been blazed for us when we commit changes to the database,
our quality assurance is going to assuredly be similar to the quality we
have produced in the past.

In short, we have heard strongly from the community that we are not
producing software of the quality that they expect; and the community
has followed up those words with a significant investment in the QA
project; and we as a developer team are _not_ following through with the
process improvements we had agreed to adopt.

FWIW, should anyone want to follow some commits to teach themselves how
to add pgTap tests, I did go through the learning process to support
https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1242999 - the tests I created
and the instructions for running them are basic, but they're a start.
Thanks to Galen for giving me a pointer in the right direction.