[Insight-developers] Process breakdown

[Cory Quammen]

We have some Windows systems that are often idle. I'd be happy to set
them up for CDash @ Home if that will help get more robot builds for
Windows. We can't dedicate these machines to testing, however, so they
will come into and leave the pool from time to time.

If someone wants to add Windows specific directions on this tutorial
(http://www.itk.org/Wiki/ITK_Release_4/Testing_On_Demand/Tutorial#How_to_Setup_a_Client)
to make it fast for me to set up a Windows CDash @ Home installation
(or point me to existing instructions tailored to Windows), I can try
to get some of these machines going.

Thanks,
Cory

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 11:36 AM, Bill Lorensen <bill.lorensen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> In the past 2 weeks we have seen at least three instances where merged
> topics are not compiling on some platforms. When the dashboard turns
> red on multiple systems because of compiler errors, we essentially
> lose a day to fix prior problems and we fail to detect defects
> introduced by other topic merges.
>
> We already have two mechanisms in place to prevent this, but they are
> not working.
>
> 1) Gerrit robot builds: The sole robot windows build cannot keep up
> with the workload. Consequently, topics are getting merged without a
> windows build.
> 2) Continuous builds: It seems we only have a Mac and Sun build. The
> Sun is really fast. But we lack a windows continuous build.
>
> As we approach the alpha and beta deadlines we will see a flurry of
> merges. We cannot afford to have a broken process.
>
> Until our automated processes become more robust, I suggest the following;
>
> 1) For gerrit, if you only have a linux (windows) system, do not merge
> your topic until the robot for windows(linux) has a clean build/test
> of one of the reviewers verifies the topic on their windows(linux)
> system.
> 2) If you merge a topic, manually watch the ITKv4 Continuous
> dashboard. If you're luck, the fast Sun build will help catch possible
> windows error.
>
> At this point I'm sorry to say that we are in worse shape than when we
> had a cross section of continuous builds. Altough Gerrit is helping us
> review code, it is not preventing dashboard disasters.
>
> Bill
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-- 
Cory Quammen
Computer Integrated Systems for Microscopy and Manipulation (CISMM)
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~cquammen