Re: Proposal: adopt a "test required" policy for spec changes

On 09/28/2017 06:45 AM, Mike West wrote:
> Hrm. We rushed the call last week (my fault!), and ended up skipping over
> this entirely.
> 
> I'm still in favor of adopting a policy along the lines of Web
> Performance's, I'm still a little bit concerned about velocity, but I'm
> still assuaged that an incubation-first strategy should reduce the costs as
> most of the work we're doing in this WG should be polishing as opposed to
> making radical changes in the direction of an unproven design.
> 
> Wendy, would adopting such a policy require any changes to formal W3C
> docs/charter/etc, or would adding a CONTRIBUTING file be something we could
> decide to do without asking permission? :)

Procedurally, a group decision is sufficient. Dan, when you think the
group has consensus, go ahead!

--Wendy


> -mike
> 
> On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 1:49 PM, Philip Jägenstedt <foolip@google.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> Quite excited about this, is this blocked on having a meeting?
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 1:50 PM Mike West <mkwst@google.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm in favor of adopting a policy along the lines of Web Performance's.
>>> Requiring tests for changes to a document in CR, in particular, seems like
>>> a no-brainer, since we ought to have enough implementation experience by
>>> that point to make writing tests against an implementation trivial.
>>>
>>> I'm a little more skeptical about a test-first approach to designing a
>>> feature in the first place, though, as I see some marginal risk of locking
>>> ourselves into a bad design just due to inertia and sunk cost. Chrome's
>>> incubation-first strategy seems like a reasonable way of mitigating this
>>> from a working group perspective (e.g. we'd only adopt documents (and
>>> therefore apply a test-first policy to them)) once we were reasonably
>>> confident that their general shape was itself reasonable.
>>>
>>> +Philip who's been thinking about this a lot, both from Chrome's
>>> perspective, and from the perspective of the WHATWG (where such a policy is already
>>> solidly in place <https://whatwg.org/working-mode>)).
>>>
>>> -mike
>>>
>>> On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 9:47 PM, Daniel Veditz <dveditz@mozilla.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> The W3 leadership has been emphasizing the importance of ensuring
>>>> interoperability through Web Platform Tests. Some groups have adopted a
>>>> policy of requiring corresponding web-platform-tests pull requests for
>>>> before landing normative spec changes. Since interoperability is part of
>>>> getting a spec to become a Recommendation this makes sense especially for
>>>> specs that are in or entering CR. Should we adopt such a policy?
>>>>
>>>> The Web Performance group adopted the following:
>>>> [[
>>>> ALL normative spec changes are generally expected to have a
>>>> corresponding pull request in web-platforms-tests, either in the form of
>>>> new tests or modifications to existing tests, or must include the
>>>> rationale for why test updates are not required for the proposed update.
>>>> [...]
>>>> ]]
>>>> https://github.com/w3c/web-per <http://goog_1391446905>
>>>> formance/blob/gh-pages/CONTRIB <http://goog_1391446905>UTING.md
>>>>
>>>> ... and the CSS Working Group adopted one last week:
>>>> [[
>>>> For normative changes for any specification in CR or later as well as
>>>> the pre-CR specifications listed below, a corresponding web-platform-tests
>>>> PR must be provided, except if testing is not practical; for other
>>>> specifications it is usually appreciated. Typically, both PRs will be
>>>> merged at the same time. Note that a test change that contradicts the spec
>>>> should not be merged before the corresponding spec change.
>>>> [...]
>>>> ]]
>>>> https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
>>>>
>>>> Good idea? Objections? Respond on list and we can talk about it on our
>>>> next call (Sept 20).
>>>>
>>>> -Dan Veditz
>>>>
>>>
>>>
> 


-- 
Wendy Seltzer -- wseltzer@w3.org +1.617.715.4883 (office)
Strategy Lead, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
https://wendy.seltzer.org/        +1.617.863.0613 (mobile)

Received on Thursday, 28 September 2017 14:02:23 UTC