968261 - Create solution to improve try usage for debugging intermittent test issues + development of new tests

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Release Engineering :: General, defect)

Description

[Armen [:armenzg]]

If we can improve this scenario we can probably improve our costs of EC2 and speed up the development time for A-team members.

I think that if we had a tree similar to the try server but we were able to specify from where to download a build and a test package it would be improve this scneario.

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I know that my try usage is mostly bisecting stuff and trial/error of new things.  I have probably done 100+ pushes to try in the last month and only landed 4 patches as a result of it.

I might be the exception, but here is what i am doing:
* make my edits, push to try
* observe failures, tweak patches, rrepeat
* right now I am at 50+ pushes for chunking browser chrome

I do this because:
* I cannot reproduce the errors locally
* when I get a loaner slave, I cannot reproduce the errors

What I would prefer to have:
* build tree in the cloud that could do incremental builds (i.e. save a lot of time)
** alternatively - a way to edit test cases, manifests, harnesses WITHOUT rebuilding
* a way to have a tests.zip file references from a people account, then I could edit it and retrigger a run without a full set of builds (I do this for talos and saved at least 50 pushes to try last month)