How we handle the support and testing for pre-reqs

[balhar-jakub]

We need to figure out how do we track the state of the support for pre requisite technologies and their upgrades.

It has multiple parts

• What do we need to do in order to actually test?
• Are we able to get to Day-1 support for Zowe?

ZAC needs to discuss

• Is there a way for OMP to join the IBM NDA?
• Is there another way to accept?

Expected outcomes

• Process and document explaining what we guarantee and how.

[balhar-jakub]

ZAC opened the issue for the Community participation in the Beta programs here: #1977

[armstro]

Meeting held July 18th with IBM ISV support org that runs hosted close betas.

I laid out the current situation with Zowe. We need to test on announced (but not not yet GA'd levels) of z/OS. Currently testing is done by vendors in the close beta program but that is not considered an open process. (We did discuss that vendors can collaborate but not disclose details of z/OS 3.1 in the open community.) We discussed Marist and agreed that is not a site for pre-GA code. We discussed the possibility of an OMP Z box for open betas - but that box is not yet in place.

Net - An action was taken to discuss internally with an IBM focal point for open software ecosystem. (Meeting planned for next week.) The objective is to collect other open source beta access requirements to establish a single and consistent IBM policy. For the near term in 2023 (for z/OS V3.1) will need an NDA therefore we need to continue vendor specific testing and private collaboration or errors and debugging.

[JoeNemo]

This is extremely disappointing. I would like to escalate to Kevin Stoodley or higher.

[JoeNemo]

If we charge $0.01 for Zowe can we become a real ISV?

Edit: This comment was a joke about how Zowe could get into better beta programs with IBM if Zowe was an ISV rather than OSS. Jokes never work in github comments.

[armstro]

You are welcome to contact Kevin. This is not a final answer - I am providing an update.

I don't think it is about the costs. I assume the costs charged to ISVs is to help defray the cost of the hardware they use. It is probably more than .01. The issue is that z/OS betas operate under NDAs and there is not a good way to be an open community and enter into NDA.

I am told there is precedent for open source communities working with pre-GA code but we (the Open Mainframe Project) have not participated in such an arrangement and IBM has not provided policy on how it would be done. That is what I am pursuing. I am told we are not the only open source community with this type requirement - I am trying to find out what others are asking.

[balhar-jakub]

The current state

We as the Zowe community don't have access to day 0 for things like new z/OS release but even when we get access it isn't clear what tests we run for tolerance. The most probable candidates are smoke tests within the zowe-install-packaging repository, but these are really just a smoke tests that doesn't properly cover the Zowe functionality.

Describe the experience you'd like
I want to expand the smoke tests suite to give us decent understanding of whether Zowe actually works. This suite should be used against areas such as:

• zOS release
• Java release
• JavaScript release

[balhar-jakub]

Proposal:

To https://docs.zowe.org/stable/getting-started/overview add new section on Supported technologies. This section should contain the information about the technologies that Zowe claims support for.

To verify that we support the technology as a community we should have smoke tests running against the technology on z/OS.

Otherwise this could contain information from vendors that they verified through the smoke tests on other configurations.

To actually test we will create an Epic within the Community repository for every technology to be tested with the applicable projects mentioned.