NB68NetCAT
NetCAT 6.8 Plan
NetBeans Community Acceptance Testing program
Goal of the program
NetCAT 6.8 will be run during stabilization of NetBeans 6.8 from Feature Freeze to Release Candidate 1. Its primary purpose is to help test NetBeans 6.8, get early feedback on the main features and IDE quality. Secondary purpose is to serve as a Customer Acceptance - ask NetBeans community for their Go/NoGo opinion on RC1 in a form of survey.
Organization
NetCAT 6.8 will be organized and lead by Jiri Kovalsky. Jiri will coordinate the program and perform high level communication with the community and internal engineering teams. He will closely work with QE engineers responsible for the main IDE areas. Areas and names of responsible QE engineers are available here. These engineers will watch feedback on the NetCAT mailing list and forum to help users with issues and to better understand NetBeans 6.8 quality. They will also serve as primary contact for developers in case of hot issues. Standard test specifications will serve as a starting point for participants with lower knowledge in some functionality area.
Infrastructure
The following resources will be available during NetCAT 6.8 program:
- NetCAT project home page
- Overall bug dashboard will include NetCAT column highlighting bugs filled by NetCAT participants
- Special bug submission form will be created to simplify reporting issues and to add [68cat] prefix to issue descriptions
- Mailing list and web forum will be main communication channels
- Final CA survey will be open to the whole NetBeans community
Community Acceptance (CA) survey
- CA survey will be focused on critical-to-quality (CTQ) areas i.e. to get acceptance for NetBeans 6.8 release drivers.
- CA survey will be accessible to everybody in NetBeans community.
- If more than 10% of all survey respondents select particular IssueZilla bug as critical, it becomes RC showstopper by definition, it must be fixed and new RC build must be produced.
- If more than 20% of all survey respondents do not accept the RC build in some CTQ area, QE and Development departments will have to compile a detailed analysis evaluating all critical issues pointed out in the survey. Its purpose would be to either recommend the release or request more bugfixes and postpone it.
Stuff to be developed
- Simplified IssueZilla query/submission forms
- NetCAT column in overall quality dashboard
- NetBeans Community Acceptance survey form
- NetCAT satisfaction survey
Others
- no CAT points activity monitoring system
- no selection of participants i.e. subscription to netcat@netbeans.org list open to everyone
- voluntary registration in a special Wiki page
- best participants determined manually (based on activity, bug/rfe submissions, other contributions, documentation reviews, FAQs etc.)
- rewards: TBD
Schedule
- 8/31 - Program announced on nbusers and nbdev lists. Volunteers subscribe to NetCAT mailing list.
- 9/4 - Feature Freeze. NetCAT team starts testing the latest daily builds.
- 9/15 - First weekly report sent.
- 9/21 - Beta release
- 10/30 - Final CA survey questions defined.
- 11/9 - RC1 release + CA survey opened
- 11/17 - Last weekly report sent.
- 11/24 - CA survey closed, results processed.
- 12/3 - NetCAT game over
