[dot] Announcing the KDE Quality Team

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1078249862/

From: Carlos Leonhard Woelz <>
Dept: welp-wanted
Date: Tuesday 02/Mar/2004, @18:51

Announcing the KDE Quality Team
===============================

   The KDE Community is pleased to announce the launch of the Quality
Team Project [http://quality.kde.org/], a community of contributors who
will serve as a gateway between developers and users in the KDE Project,
and as a new way for people to begin contributing.

     KDE is a very attractive project, offering high quality software
and is freely available. There is a lot of people who feel the urge to
give something back, but stop in the middle of the way, frustrated by
the steep learning curve. The aim of the project is to reduce these
barriers by welcoming these potential contributors, and by offering
documentation, support, and even guidance if requested.

     The objective is to support the new contributors, programmers or
not, in order to improve all areas of a given application (instead of a
given area of the whole project), working orthogonally with the
maintainers, developers, documenters, interface designers and artists.

     Have you ever wished to help KDE in some way, but never knew how?
The KDE Quality Team might be just what you need! People with disparate
backgrounds can join the KDE Quality Team Project, for the development
of a complex desktop environment requires a wide range of skills. The
main tool to help any application is knowing well its interface and
functions, so any user who knows and cares for any KDE application can
almost immediately help the project. Depending on the team member
programming knowledge, artistic and writing skills or willingness to
learn, there is no area of the application that cannot be improved.

     In terms of support for new contributors, the project already
offers:

    * A complete and safe step by step building guide
      [http://quality.kde.org/develop/cvsguide/], with information to
      help you decide what to build, to solve build problems, and to run
      the new KDE build.
    * A guide to help you maintain a CVS working folder
      [http://quality.kde.org/develop/cvsguide/managestep.php],
      providing with all you need know to set up your sources, update,
      apply patches and submit your changes to KDE, either by generating
      patches or committing.
    * A guide to help you contribute to KDE, the Quality Team HOWTO.

     In an interview conducted by Henrique Pinto, Carlos Woelz, the
person who is currently putting the most effort in the project, speaks
about the project:

     Why there is need for a KDE Quality Team?

     There are many people out there who want to contribute, but didn't
manage to know where to start, specially non programmers or at least non
unix programmers. To them, this is a whole new world (CVS, compiling,
docbook, xhtml, etc...). I think there is no better way to help KDE than
to support these newcomers.

     If you are curious about the original motivation, you can read the
original proposal [http://www.geocities.com/carloswoelz/proposal.txt].

     What was the inspiration for such a project?

     When I started thinking about giving something back to KDE, I had
trouble knowing where to start. There is a lot of good information at
developer.kde.org [http://developer.kde.org/], but (obviously) much of
it is oriented to unix developers. I felt a bit lost, the learning curve
is steep for someone like me coming from the windows world. Also, I
started working with applications I knew too little, and with too many
of them at the same time.

     In which ways KDE will benefit from having a Quality Team?

     The KDE developers have been doing a great job. My hope is that we
can bring the documentation, artwork, communication with our users, and
the little boring details of the user interface to the same level of
quality of the KDE applications. Also, managing bugs and wishes can help
programmers focus on fixing bugs and adding new features.

     How can one get involved with the Team?

     If you are an experienced contributor, and are interested in
guiding and reviewing the new contributors work, join the kde-quality
mailing list. If you like a KDE application and want to help, join the
kde-quality mailing list.

     For new contributors, there are many different ways to help the KDE
project. We have a collection of tasks, with the necessary skills on how
to perform them, and links to guides on how to perform them at the KDE
Quality Website:

      quality.kde.org/develop/modules/index.php
[http://quality.kde.org/develop/modules/]

     The KDE PIM module was chosen as recommended initial target for the
KDE Quality Team because of its shorter release cycle, so things are
going faster there. There is wiki a page to coordinate the efforts for
the PIM Quality Team, where you can have an idea of the current efforts.

      wiki.kdenews.org/tiki-index.php?page=Quality+Team+KDE+PIM
[http://wiki.kdenews.org/tiki-index.php?page=Quality+Team+KDE+PIM]

     How will be the relationship between Quality Team members and
application maintainers?

     The maintainer and developers know the functionality of the
application better then anyone, therefore their help and review is
needed for all activities around that application. This stresses the
importance of doing serious work. If the team does good work, I am sure
it will be respected and helped by the maintainers.

     I couldn't be happier with the response from the community to this
project. The KDE PIM developers, for instance, were planning to start
something similar to the KDE Quality Team. We joined forces, Adriaan de
Groot is the Quality Team Coordinator for KDE PIM, and they put a KDE
PIM page with information about the PIM tasks at the KDE PIM site:

     pim.kde.org/development/janitor_jobs/

     How many people are involved in the project in this initial stage?

     Already more than I imagined. The project in integrating nicely to
KDE normal development process.

     How do you envision KDE and the KDE Quality Team one year from now?

     I don't try to envision anything. What I am sure is that I will
help the KDE project. All the work put on the Quality Team (writing
guides, the website, the structure, etc...) has already produced good
documentation. I am not worried about it, because any time spent with
the project will be well spent.