RegressionSearchAndDestroy

• Contest ended Oct. 5, 2006 at 5:00 p.m. PDT (San Francisco time)

The contest was extended until the end of the final vote and approval of a 10.2 release. Voting for 10.2.1.6 ended successfully October 5th, and the 10.2 Regression Search and Destroy Contest is thereby closed. Judges will announce the winners shortly.

The Derby 10.2 Regression Search and Destroy Contest is a contest to help ensure a smooth transition for users who are migrating to 10.2 and help achieve Derby's Forward Compatiblity goal: to 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.

Contest entries can be anything to help ease transition of existing applications to 10.2. Winners will be:

• "The top three developers or users who have made the greatest contribution toward a seamless upgrade to 10.2."

The Rules

1. Valid contest entries are any action that exposes or resolves existing regressions, improves Derby compatibility with previous releases, or improves our documentation of known differences in 10.2. Below are a few examples:

• Test an existing application with Derby 10.2 and record your results on the TenTwoApplicationTesting page.

• Find a new product regression from a previous Derby release and log it in Jira.

• 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.

• Fix a product regression.

2. Bugs filed against or fixed for new functionality does not count for the contest but are of course welcome.

3. Three winners are chosen by impartial judge(s) based on entries completed by the end of the final vote and approval of a 10.2 Release Candidate.. Stan Bradbury, Rajesh Kartha and John Embretsen are our judges and can meet on #derby IRC after September 15 to discuss who the winners are.

4. The winners get organic chocolate and of course glory, kudos 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).

Ideas and Low Hanging Fruit

There are lots of ways to enter the contest, help ease upgrade and of course just make a better quality 10.2. Below are some ideas.

• Test your application or another application with Derby and record it on TenTwoApplicationTesting.

• Look for low hanging fruit Jira entries. Look for open Jira issues that you suspect might be regressions and add a comment with the tag RegressionSearchAndDestroy with a hint.

• Create new Jira entries with tasks that might expose more regressions like running the tests with a low memory configuration.

• Look at the open issues with the RegressionSearchAndDestroy tag and address them. If you determine an issue is not a regression or is no longer relevant, please make a comment in the Jira entry.

• Evaluate 10.2 fixed issues to see if they might have existing application impact, need release notes. Mark them as souch and add release notes.

• Fix a regression.

How to Enter

First download 10.2 beta and try it.

You are automatically entered in the contest if you add your application testing results to TenTwoApplicationTesting. Please list a summary of your other entries below if you would like to enter yourself or someone else in the contest.

Click here for a report of product regressions that have been updated since the contest began 7/17/2006. Not all qualify but this is a good report to use to find entries if folks don't add themselves

Note: This contest was inspired by the Mustang Regression challenge.