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Summary

Apache CloudStack is a broad and encompassing project covering many areas that require in-depth technical knowledge.  As such, it is not possible for one person to know and/or test all components of CloudStack in depth.  Miscommunications and misunderstandings between developers can lead to poor quality in CloudStack's code and cause community to deliver a unstable release.  Knowledge lost from one release to the next can cause regressions in the current release.  This page details the development process the CloudStack community must follow in order to ensure the community delivers high quality releases.  This page is a must read for all developers and testers.

 

Process Principles

This process is developed with the following principles.

  • Continuous integration is key to a stable code base.
  • Automation is the only insurance the community has against regressions in releases.
  • Constrain the actual hardware testing to testing CloudStack's physical/virtual orchestration.
  • Use simulators to speed up testing of CloudStack's self-service business logic.
  • Properly performed code reviews are key to catching problems early.

Developer Responsibilities

As a code contributor to Apache CloudStack, regardless of if you have committer or contributor status, your responsibilities are as follows:

Acquiring Knowledge
  • Understand how to use JIRA to communicate your work with release managers, users, developers, and testers.
  • Understand CloudStack's architecture and where you should or should not make changes.
  • Understand CloudStack's simulator and how to run it and how to change it to test your code.
  • Understand CloudStack's Marvin framework and how to use it to write automated tests.
  • Understand CloudStack's code check-in process.
  • Understand CloudStack's review process and your role in it as the reviewer and the code submitter.
JIRA

Communicating what issues you're working on and how you're working on it is an important part of participating in the community.  We do that on the mailing list.  However, you should use JIRA to update issue status and add comments with conclusions drawn from mailing list discussions.  This allows release managers, users, and testers to follow the issue better, to understand if the issue is being worked on, to get a better feel of whether an issue will be resolved in time for the release.

Writing Automated Tests

Automated tests ensures that your feature will not be regressed.  Anyone who submits a code change that breaks an existing automated test is responsible for fixing that automated test or revert the code change.  All automated tests should  

Continuous Integration

Maintaining CloudStack's Continuous Integration is the job of every developer.  


On Code Reviews

 

Infrastructures Provided

Citrix, a sponsor of Apache Software Foundation, donated a testing service in which all developers can ask automation be run on their branch.  Hardware is  

Importance of Automation

In order to ensure that releases do not regress features, automation

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