Derby Regression Search And Destroy Competition

[Kathey Marsden]

Well we've been putting features into 10.2 for a year now and  from all indications we want to make a commitment to compatibility. the Forward Compatibility Guidelines [1] say: "The goal is to allow any application written against the public interfaces of an older version of Derby to run, without any changes, against a newer version of Derby..... (changes that break existing applications)  should be a deliberate choice by the community, not by accident" But the trouble is we don't really test compatibility at all well and sometimes tests are changed to adapt to new behavior and we don't really catch the impact to users at the time, so in fact I don't think that all  the behavior changes in 10.2 are a conscious decision as they should be.  So, inspired by the Mustang Regression Challenge [2] I would like to introduce the "Derby Regression Search and Destroy Competition".  This competition, in addition to finding regressions,  will also  incorporate  fixing any regressions that are found.  The winners will be:  "The top three developers or users who have  made the greatest contribution toward a seamless upgrade to 10.2." If folks think this is a good idea, I will put up a Wiki for the competition, but here are the general guidelines: 1)   Any action that exposes or resolves existing regressions, improves  Derby compatibility with previous releases, or improves our documentation of known differences in 10.2 is considered.  Below are a few examples:     a) Find a  new  product regression from a previous Derby release and log it in Jira.      b) Correct the derby info for existing issues to mark them as "Regression"  if they are a regression from 10.1 or "Existing Application Impact" and "Release Note Needed"  if they were intentional changes that might affect existing applications.     c) Fix a product regression. 2)  Three winners are chosen  August 10 by  impartial volunteer judge(s)  whose decision is binding.  3)  The winners get organic chocolate  and  of course glory and huge amounts of merit.  (Contribution of other prizes is welcome, but wouldn't want to make the stakes so high the lawyers need get involved). Anyone else have ideas on this?  Would anyone like to volunteer as judge?  Judges would have to exempt themselves from the competition. Kathey [1] http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/ForwardCompatibility [2] https://mustang.dev.java.net/regchal/