ROS Quality Assurance Working Group December 2019 Meeting Notes

Quality Assurance
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Attendees:
Adam Alami (facilitator of the meeting)
Dr. Christopher Timperley
Gijs van der Hoorn
John-Paul Ore
Matt Droter
Matt Robinson
Max Krichenbauer
Ridhwan Luthra
Víctor Mayoral Vilches

Agenda:

  1. Talk by Dr. Christopher Timperley
  2. Discuss how we can accelerate the review and merge of the current initiatives:
    1. QA Dashboard. Link to the pending PR.
    2. The CI Badge for index.ros.org. Link to the pending PR.
    3. The list of pending PRs for review. Link to the pending PR.
  3. Discuss next quality initiative.
    1. Gijs proposed a warning message for outdated ROS packages Wiki pages.
    2. HAROS for ROS 2
    3. Quick introduction to quality flaws identified while researching on security

Discussion:

  1. Talk by Chris Timperley : The link to the talk slides.
  2. PRs pending reviews : We discussed the various reasons why our PRs are not attended, reviewed and merged. One of the reasons we discussed is not engaging the community adequately and socializing the QA initiatives. We decided to make a “Call for comments” posts for all our initiatives. The posts will call for people to comment and contribute to the PRs discussions.
  3. Showing ‘age’ of ROS wiki content : This initiative was discussed. The conclusion is that a community consultation should continue in order to have precise requirements of what it needed to happen in order to address the problem.
  4. We ran out of time. We couldn’t discuss these two items:
    1. HAROS for ROS 2
    2. Quick introduction to quality flaws identified while researching on security

Actions:

  1. @Alami and @max-krichenbauer to post in the QA Forum “Call for Comments” for the pending initiatives…
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Thanks for the report @Alami!

Too bad we couldn’t have time for this :frowning: . Regarding HAROS, I wanted to call for additional input on anyone trying this actively. We are starting to (as pointed out in a previous meeting) and would be happy to share our experiences if anyone’s interested.

Regarding the second item, I understand it might be of less interest to the group given the fact that is mostly security-related (though quality and security interconnect in some cases). Would it make sense to try again this second item in the next telco? A 15-20 min slot would be enough to share a few bits of our work there. We’ve made an effort to align with ROSin robusts’ work so in a way, it follows from Chris’s talk.

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Definitely. Will dedicate 15 mins to both items in next meeting.

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Fantastic! We will prepare accordingly then.

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Hi Víctor,

(Sorry if this is hijacking the topic a little)

Regarding HAROS for ROS 2, I would like to add here that Max Krichenbauer submitted a PR some time ago which adds support for ROS 2 workspaces. This is already available in the current release.

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Hi Victor,
Sorry for the late follow-up and sorry we didn’t have time to talk about this anymore last Thursday.

As Andre already pointed out, I’ve been working on making HAROS “ROS2-ready”.

Apart from the PRs that allow it to find ROS2 packages,
there is also a ROS2 (ament) linter package in development:


With this, you can simply add ament_haros as a test dependency, and HAROS will be automatically installed in an appropriate virtual environment and run to analyze your code.
It’s still under development, but should already work for both ament_python and ament_cmake packages.

Could you please let me know why you’re interested in the topic? Than I can make sure that future development will cover your use case.

Best regards,
Max

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I am glad to see @ChrisTimperley 's talk being circulated more widely. It is a great piece of work and deserves a wider audience. The ROSCon videos should be up shortly, but I think this work could have a lot of impact as a blog post. It would be great if the original authors would be able to summarize their work in document so we could point new users to it. I might be able to find a platform to publish the work on if that were to happen.

I would like to know what needs to happen with respect to the Wiki last edited PR. Is there anything I can do to help gather requirements?

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I would like to know what needs to happen with respect to the Wiki last edited PR. Is there anything I can do to help gather requirements?

Thank you!
I think it would need a reviewer and of course more people voicing their opinion either in favor or against it.

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Thanks, @Katherine_Scott! I don’t think that we had considered summarising the work as a blog post / a concise document for ROS developers, but that seems like a brilliant idea that we should definitely prioritise :grinning: If you could help us to publish such a document, that would be fantastic!