[Owncloud] Testing, upgrading and assuring quality experience for users.

[Bjorn Madsen]

Hello Developers & administrators;

I spend quite a bit of time on release testing to make sure my users are
not surprised in a negative way, and I was wondering if we could help each
other increase our own productivity as I'm sure a lot of duplication of
effort is going on.

Following google's developer motto: *We aren't better at making software
than anyone else. We just have more data about how it is used.*

I think this is true, with the difference, that we could, but are not,
using our data systematically.

The request for +1 votes:
Could we - the people - benefit from creating a release testing package
which permits/shows the following behaviour:

   1. We *select a group of users* who use the "current" version[1]
   actively.
   2. When a "release version" comes becomes available for testing it may
   run in a virtual environment, literally cloning the signals that the
   selected users perform, without reverse impact on their repositories. It
   may even run with a predetermined delay (if appropriate) to replicate
   activity.
   3. At given intervals, a comparison is made between the users "current"
   version and the "release version", to verify a relevant list of metric's [2]
   4. The comparison is f.x. automatically submitted as a test reports to
   the administrators (or OCteams) mailbox (or whatever is more convenient).
   In this way we do not replicate our tests but actually run them
   collectively with collective knowledge being gathered.

Notes:
At [1]: These could be selected by the administrator or - more long term -
we would ask a profiler to select the users who use a very wide range of
features so that the solution space of the test gets as close to exhausted
as possible.
At [2]: I would imagine something like:

   - comparison of sets of sha1sum of files "stable" vs. "release" of the
   selected users (integrity).
   - bandwidth usage "stable" vs. "release" (comm. load)
   - process time "stable" vs. "release"
   - statistics from the logs in aggregated form from "stable" vs.
   "release".
   - ...

Would this be valuable to others too?

@OCteam: This could give the possibility that users can "click to upgrade
to version x.x.x+1 instead of being foie gras fed with push from the
administrator for a "grace period". I know from reports that this is a key
user appreciation with google's systems, as the user "who doesn't have time
for this upgrade right now, can opt-out for a grace period".

@RaspberryPi Users: Don't panic about memory footprint, I'm sure we can
figure out a way to disable this dual-environment if the memory footprint
doesn't allow it.

Kind regards,

-- 
Bjorn Madsen
*Researcher Complex Systems Research*
bjorn.madsen at operationsresearchgroup.com
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