[xwiki-devs] [VOTE] Important: Strategy to fix failing tests and stability

Hi devs, Here's the situation: * We've been having a hard time releasing on time and the main issue is test stability. We lag by at least a week and we even release with failing tests, causing regressions. * It's not the role of the release manager to fix tests before releasing * It's not normal that some people spend time fixing issues caused by others and that others continue to work on the next thing they are working on. Everyone needs to help. Here's what I propose as a drastic and temporary measure till we get better: 1) It's forbidden to commit anything till all tests are passing (unit AND functional tests), unless what is committed is about fixing tests. On the exceptional case when a committer absolutely needs to commit even though tests are failing he needs to ask the permission explicitly. 2) When tests are failing, everyone should stop what they're doing and help stabilize again. We synchronize on IRC. 3) Flickering tests can be marked as @Ignore and a jira issue created to stabilize the build. 4) Release Manager creates a release branch 1 week before the release to let everyone stabilize the build On a long term we need to work on improving our CI so that functional tests are built faster. One idea is: more agents and functional tests spread on several agents. Here's my +1 to apply this now for master (3.2-SNAPSHOT leading to 3.2M1), which means not committing anything more till we have all functional tests passing. Thanks -Vincent