Koha ILS

Bug-Enhancement-Patch Workflow

by Jesse Maseto on Aug 9, 2012

I have had a few people recently asking about Koha bugs. Mainly why certain bugs are fixed quickly and some take so long. Here are the steps taken by the Koha community. These steps are necessary in keeping Koha stable and growing.

Steps:

  1. A bug/enhancement is submitted by the ‘bug reporter’.
  2. A patch is submitted by the ‘patch writer’.
  3. (optional) RM pushed it as a QA branch.
  4. The patch is tested and signed off by the ‘patch signer’.
  5. The patch is checked by the QA team member, and bug status is set to Passed QA
  6. The patch is tested and signed off by RM
  7. If the patch passes, it is pushed into master by the RM, status is set to Pushed to master.
  8. If the RMaint has consider the patch must be pushed to stable version too, he does it and set the status to Pushed to stable
  9. The bug is marked resolved/fixed by the ‘bug closer’.
  10. The bug is closed when a release is made containing that patch.

Community Role definitions for the steps above:

  • Bug reporter: the person who reported the bug.Can also be the patch writer
  • Patch writer: the developer who proposed a patch.Can also be the bug reporter
  • RM: the Release Manager (elected position)
  • QA Manager: the developer (elected member of the QA team) who says the patch is QAcompliant
  • Patch signer: the user who tested the patch and saw it works
  • Bug closer: the person who checked that the bug is now fixed.Can be the reporter, it’s preferred that the patch writer is not the closer.

Some bug/enhancements breeze right though all of these step and in to Koha. Then there are some bug/enhancements that don’t pass QA and those fixes basically need to be started all over again. What determines what moves quickly and what stalls has to do with the complexity of the code, the difficulty of the testing and sometimes just the level of interest in the bug/enhancement. You can help patches move through the process by commenting on the bug reports and/or testing things yourself.

I hope that this information is helpful and informative. If you have any further questions regarding this process please feel free to contact us. You can also find this information and much more about Koha on the Koha Wiki. http://wiki.koha-community.org

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