Proposal to revise forest graph and integration practices for JDK 9

[Lana Steuck]

On 12/05/2013 10:23 AM, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
> 2013/12/5 2:10 -0800, philip.race at oracle.com:
>> I don't think what Artem said is quite correct. SQE may not do manual
>> testing But the integrator certainly does.  The final steps of our
>> integration process has always included certain manual tests (applets,
>> SwingSet, Java2Demo) on all the platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris and
>> now Mac) on the final built bits.  We will need to maintain that
>> process.
> Lana -- Can you handle doing these manual tests once a week?

Once we open up jdk9, I'll be doing integrations for multiple Jdk releases:
- jdk7 update and sometimes there are two updates still being worked on 
at the same time, e.g. finishing 7u40 and starting 7u60,
- jdk8 update (again could be two updates at the same time),
- and jdk9.

For all of my integrations I run these manual tests which is very 
tedious and time consuming job. It looks like we will need SQE help with 
doing the PITs. If they can perform the tests, then we could certainly 
do weekly integrations.

One more point:
Whenever a project becomes really active, things get rough. E.g. in the 
middle of Jdk8 development, we saw numerous build outages and various 
issues with incorrect fixes, etc. This is when people start appreciating 
isolated team forests. I understand the benefits of combining TL and 
Hotspot (we have seen many issues b/c of their code separation), however 
in my experience as the integrator, TL and Client do benefit from being 
isolated from each other. In the last year or so,  there was just one 
case when a developer ask for a fix from Client to be brought over to TL 
earlier than scheduled, so they don't seem to suffer from being 
separate. However, there were multiple issues, when Awt or 2d or TL had 
their issues (broken builds or tests) and could work it out without 
affecting others and without any additional stress.

Thanks,
Lana