[vtk-developers] Software Quality: Talking vs Walking

[Bill Lorensen]

On January 27, Sean McBride started an e-mail conversation about the
state of VTK's dashboards. Although he initiated the conversion about
frustration over gerrit recurring test failures, the conversation
quickly moved to the state of VTK software quality.

The following is a highly edited 15 reply e-mail discussion:

SM: But with VTK, there's pretty much no build machine that's green,
    and so the "*Tests failing*" section seems to be almost always a list
    of false positives (wrt to the patch at hand).Could this email be
    enhanced to divide the "*Tests failing*" section into 'newly failing'
    vs 'still failing'?

DC: We could write tests that pass.

SM: That'd be nice too, but, practically speaking, given the state of
       the VTK dashboard over the years, I thought my suggestion might be
       easier, and of course not mutually exclusive to yours

DC: Granted. But it sure would be nice to see it greened up once again

MH: It would be easier to make them green than try to devise some
       "baseline of failing tests".

BL: The quality of vtk code continues to decline... Our vtk community
       has lost the will to keep the toolkit at the high quality levels vtk
       had in the past.
       We should all be embarrassed.

DG: Your statement that we test less than 1/2 of the code is false.
       There are some dashboard machines (e.g. hythloth) cover much more.  I
       know that I'm being picky with semantics here, but the truth is, we
       have so many failing tests that the dashboard isn't even able to
       produce accurate code quality metrics.

BL: I agree that there are so many failing tests that we have no idea
      about the quality of vtk. In the past, we bragged about our
      process. We cannot do that anymore.

DG: Now the overall issue of developer participation in the code
       quality process... that's a much bigger issue than the dashboard
       alone.  Is it a mentorship issue, i.e. are new developers not being
       taught the "ways of the source"?  Are there too many developers,
       i.e. too many cats to herd?

DM: So yeah, lets discuss how to and improve our processes, and all
       chip in like the good team we are to clean up the dashboard. But no I
       don't think that anyone should be ashamed of the state of things.
-------------------------------------------

"You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?"

On January 27,
Gerrit: 26 recurring failures
Continuous: 12 recurring failures
Nightly Expected: 0 green, 21 red dashboards

Since January 27, the community started walking again.
On March 7,
Gerrit: 0 recurring failures
Continuous: 0 recurring failures
Nightly Expected: 21 green, 7 red

-- 
Unpaid intern in BillsBasement at noware dot com
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