826914 - document how to get a test to show up on TBPL

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Testing :: General, defect)

Description

[Jeff Hammel]

In the last almost three years since I've been at Mozilla, one of the most frequently asked substantial questions I've heard as a member of the A*Team from other teams is: "We're doing a new testing thing.  How do we get that to show up on TBPL?"  However, unless I've missed something (entirely possible), the procedure to get a test into buildbot and live and reporting to TBPL isn't documented anywhere.

Usually, the answer is something like:
- find a releng contact, possibly by going through Oduinn, to do the buildbot pieces and final staging of the harness
- in many cases, find an A*Team contact for shakedown/finalization of the test harness (and, likely, modifying the build system to run the tests for the developer use-case)
- find someone that will add the whatsits to the TBPL code and redploy that
- file bugs for these things

If we wanted to put something like that at, say, https://wiki.mozilla.org/Auto-tools or whereever, that would at least give a place to point to when the question comes up.  Obviously these are all steps that can't be automagicked away.  But I do think documenting the basics will give some context and set expectations for stakeholders that do want tests added, and this will make our (read: releng + ateam) lives easier.

To this end it might be a good idea to give at least some idea of the things that can/should be done.  What (often) needs to change with buildbotcustom? buildbot-configs? What staging needs to be done? How long will this take? What needs to change in the TBPL code? How does one get this to happen? And so on.

If we can figure out a place to put the wiki page (sorry, I never have any idea where to put such things on our wikis), I'm happy to fill out what I know and then iterate on it.

Comment 1

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown] (pto Apr 11-18)]

Mass closing bugs with no activity in 2+ years. If this bug is important to you, please re-open.