[Chandler-dev] Alpha4 debug and stabilization

[Philippe Bossut]

Hi,

So we declared alpha4 feature freeze last week (minus 1 item: bug 5304 
which is still under code review). We since entered the end game part of 
the release with mandatory code reviews and bugs triaged by Bug Council.

The current bug count is high but manageable (less than 10 bugs per 
devs) but the finding rate is still very high: in some areas, we log 
bugs as fast as we fix them. We can punt more aggressively but we also 
want to provide and Alpha4 that is truly dogfoodable and of the highest 
quality. Right now, we really want everybody to pause the feature 
development and help stabilizing the application. This  means fixing 
bugs  assigned to you of course as well helping others get their bug 
count down, but this also means testing the app, logging bugs and 
helping to cover as much scenarios as possible, especially those 
scenarios that are not covered by our automated tests system now (stress 
tests, long sessions on various platforms, etc...).

We are willing to spend the time we need to get to good dogfood quality. 
That certainly means we'll be slipping the Oct 3rd date for Alpha4. We 
haven't set a date yet. Katie and me we'll assess during the next 2 days 
the status of the Chandler devs work load and review this at our 
Chandler Engineering meeting Thursday.

Beyond fixing bugs, here are a couple of things that we'd like you to do 
to help:

Prio 1 - Run Chandler!
-----------------------------
Looks simple but having an instance of Chandler running in the 
background constantly is actually helping: Chandler now does regular 
sync with the Cosmo server so just having Chandler subscribed to a 
couple of collections and syncing is helping. We had reports of users 
crashing just keeping Chandler idle as is and we need more reports on 
similar issues to nail that one.

Prio 1bis - Subscribe to the Office calendar
------------------------------------------------------
If you don't know which calendar to subscribe to, try the office 
calendar. It's a substantial one and some of us are updating it 
regularly so this will exercise syncing quite nicely:
 - Read-write: 
https://cosmo-demo.osafoundation.org/home/smooney/Office_Calendar?ticket=n4e1mr2cz1
 - Read-only: 
https://cosmo-demo.osafoundation.org/home/smooney/Office_Calendar?ticket=rlbrrk2cz0

Prio 2 - Turn "Start Logging" on
-----------------------------------------
This option is located under the Test menu. This is Ashkan's parcel. It 
gathers info on users' usage patterns, a data that will help us 
understand how users use Chandler. As for subscribing to the office 
calendar, even if you don't use Chandler much, it's good to have it 
turned on so that we can at least give a fair test to the backend system.

Prio 3 - Set your IMAP and SMTP accounts
--------------------------------------------------------
Alpha4 has new tools for email but we need to give some level of testing 
to those beyond the functional tests. The current IMAP implementation 
will download the content of your InBox (and only your InBox...) in 
Chandler. This is workable really if you maintain a pretty lean and 
clean IMAP InBox, otherwise, well, you may not want to do that... If you 
can though, your help testing this in real life setting will be very 
much appreciated.

Cheers,
- Philippe