1. Swat Team Responsibilities and Best Practices
Darren Hart
Saul Wold
Intel Corporation
Aug 9, 2011

2. Agenda Introduction to the Swat Team Responsibilities Processes
Best practices
Resources
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3. Introduction to the Swat Team
Maintain build stability
Mitigate development volatility
Improve perception
Improve productivity
Small team of “volunteers”
Intel assignees
Community members welcome
Weekly rotating chairperson
Rotation during technical project meeting
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4. Responsibilities Subscribe to the yocto-build mailing list
Ensure EVERY failure receives a response
Known issues can receive a “KNOWN ISSUE” response
Master or Release Builds
Chairperson need not be the one to respond, but is responsible to ensure a response is made
Ensure bugs are opened as necessary
Can be deferred briefly while a solution is worked
Chairperson may delegate bug creation
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5. Best Practices Responding to failures Initial debug
Identifying an Assignee
Opening bugs
Working with the autobuilder
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6. Responding to Failures
Initial triage
Review the failure report
Determine if it is a known issue
Determine an assignee
Known/existing issues
Reply to failure report with “KNOWN ISSUE” in the body
Contact the assignee
Reply to the failure report with the assignee on CC, indicating why you assigned the issue to them, asking them to investigate further.... OR...
Ask the assignee ( , im, irc, watercooler) to respond after some investigation, but be sure to follow up.
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7. Initial Debug
You may need to dig a bit before determining an appropriate assignee
Start with the autobuilder link in the , e.g.
The last 20 lines of the stdio log are included, this is usually just enough to determine which recipes failed
Use the link for the entire log to see which task failed and errors that were reported while running the task
Detailed log of last build step: noemgd/builds/178/steps/shell_50/logs/stdio
Attempt to define a reproduction scenario. This isn't always required, but it reduces the burden to the assignee.

8. Identifying an Assignee
The goal is to ensure someone is assigned to resolve the issue. Ideally this will be someone with the context to address the issue with minimal interruption to their other work.
Identify the recipe maintainer
Check maintainers.inc or
Check the git log for recent commiters
Compare the failed commit ID with the last known good build and review the commits in between:
git log GOOD..BAD
git log GOOD..BAD – path/to/broken/recipe

9. Opening Bugs Open bugs against master and release branches
Be sure to include:
(AUTOBUILDER) in the whiteboard
The correct poky version in the version field
Link to failed autobuilder log
Summary of your debugging results
A reproduction scenario
Respond the failure with the bug ID
Notify the maintainer for master-under-test and master-next branches, but do not open bugs

10. Chairperson Rotation Weekly rotation during technical project meeting
Identify any open issues and either:
Complete them yourself
Document progress in an to the new chairperson
CC the project manager and assignees

11. Resources Yocto-Builds mailing list
The Swat Team wiki page has more detail on these processes as well as valuable information on Autobuilder best practices, should you find the need to dig even deeper into a problem:
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