ORMF team meeting minutes 12 oct 08

< To: ORMF progress reports

Attendees

• Vasile Chereches
• Achim Loerke
• Yahya Ozturk (most of the time)
• Wolfgang Ponikwar (part of the time)
• Barbara Rosi-Schwartz
• Joel Rosi-Schwartz
• George Sebastian

Unable to attend

No one

Minutes

Conference call meetings

The current scheduled time (every Sunday at 19:00 GMT) appears suitable to everyone. We will evaluate in the future if we need a change. Having found Skype to be less than ideal during this conference call, we decide to try a web based conferencing tool proposed by Wolfgang. Wolfgang, Joel and Barbara will stage a first mini conference on Monday 13 October at 17:00 GMT as a test. If this proves satisfactory, we will have a team wide "dry run" during the week, prior to our next scheduled meeting.

How to use Bugzilla for issues and work tasks

The organisation of Bugzilla tasks and issues is rather fuzzy. Barbara will prepare and share a proposal for the usage of the tool for everyone's comments and agreement. There is agreement that an organisation that optimises the use of Mylyn as a filtering mechanism would be desirable.

How to track ongoing tasks

Achim offers to produce stats on both testing and CM tasks and share them with the team on a regular basis. We decide to evaluate later if we need anything more or different.

Configuration management status

An initial evaluation of Buckminster by Achim leads him to believe that it is probably overweight for what we want to achieve, requiring too many artifacts and too much overhead. The evaluation work will continue in collaboration with Yahya through direct email connection. The outcome of the work will be a CM strategy and the setup of a release environment which will support nightly builds and nightly tests.

Testing status

Achim summarises his progress on this task. He has completed reading of the Guide document prepared by Barbara and he is currently exploring the test artifacts stored in SVN. He is elaborating a functional testing strategy that build upon and improves the original Useme testing strategy. He is proposing to use GUIDancer for all functional testing and has already offered free licenses and download information to all team members. He will soon be involving Bobby and Yahya in the process.

Bobby is currently getting acquainted with GUIDancer and is ready to start exploring test scenarios soon.

Achim will be in contact with Yahya to provide him with more information on the whole process as needed.

As for unit testing, after a brief discussion highlighting pros and cons of black box and white box testing, it is agreed that the white box testing approach is the most appropriate as a general rule. All JUnit test will reside in fragments of the plug-ins that they are testing. Joel however highlights that, in specific situations that may warrant black box testing, this should be performed (via regular test plug-ins) side by side the ubiquitous white box testing.

Organisation of the ORMF repository

Everybody has read Barbara's Guide to the repository structure and has downloaded the source from SVN. All agree that the proposed structure is sensible and appropriate.

Community building

Achim is the opinion that it is important to expose ORMF to the international community as soon as possible. Joel agrees, but also recognises that this is a difficult task due to the limited resources available on the team, and the fact that at this stage we cannot afford a person to act as ORMF's evangelist. Achim is of the opinion that, in the initial phases at least, this is a job for the team leads in any case.

Achim recommends some type of contribution to the ESE in November and offers to propose a poster. He also offers to research whether or not the automotive symposium that is part of ESE would be an appropriate forum for an ORMF presence. It is agreed that this thread of conversation can continue offline.

Wolfgang proposes to present a paper on ORMF at the upcoming Reconf conference (March 2009).

Yahya expresses willingness to search appropriate fori for exposure of ORMF in Turkey.

Any other business

Achim voices the importance of starting to share implementation work as soon as possible, in order not only to progress but also to catalyse team solidification. Joel informs the team of the architectural work he is currently performing and announces the unveiling of a work plan around this subject during the next week.