Hello (again) My Cloud Foundrians,

Some changes are coming soon that are likely to impact you and I wanted to give you a heads up in advance...

RelInt has kicked off a tract of work to improve the acceptance test suite that's run by (hopefully) all component teams before they cut releases for integration to cf-deployment.

Cf-acceptance-tests a.k.a. CATs are going to get a iterative makeover.

CATs changes are likely to be released in fits and starts because of the RelInt team's distributed focus across marshalling PR's from component teams and continual fixing of broken builds as changes come into our pipelines, but please know we are focusing a portion of our attention on CATs because we care.

Making irregular, and possibly dramatic, changes to the CATs suite could have negative impacts for all of us, so before we really get into things we're making some changes:

1. We're going to move to a develop/master split.
2. We'll validate changes to CATs in CI (against the latest cf-deployment release).
3. We'll apply semantic versioning practices to our releases.

We're just about to make the switch over to develop/master so I wanted to give you a heads up so you'll know to submit PR's to the develop branch soon rather than master.

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We'll focus initially on making improvements aimed at:

1. reducing false negatives (flakes)
2. increasing the ease and efficiency of failure diagnosis
   

Subsequent improvement steps will be based on learnings from executing on the above and talking to CATs consumers, like you.

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I'll send another note when we've officially made the switch to develop. 'Till then, keep submitting PRs to master.

If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions related to CATs, please don't hesitate to reach out to @jcollins or @relint-team ion the cats-users slack.

We're always interested in what you have to say.

Thanks very much!

Josh Collins

PM - Release Integration

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Josh Collins

PM - CF R&D Release Integration