KDE wide functional test infrastructure

[Till Adam]

Hey folks,

in a recent thread on the kmail list we've been discussing that it would be 
very nice to have a set of functional tests (as opposed to unit tests) which 
can be performed by folks willing to help before releases, or even regularly 
by people running cvs, in order to quickly identify regressions etc. I'm 
confident the concept is not alien to any of you and I don't need to 
elaborate on the merits of such an infrastructure. 

The test descriptions could (should) be published somewhere on the pim website 
(possibly autogenerated from cvs) for people to execute them. The format 
could be use case diagrams (Yeah! for umbrello ;) or plain text descriptions 
or whatever.

While trying to decide on where to put this stuff it dawned on us that it 
might be a good idea to set up a kde wide module for stuff like that. kde-qa, 
kdetests, whatever, with a pim subdir in it, which could also be the home of 
khtmltests, for example. The alternatives are:

- a subdir in kdepim called regression_tests, or whatever, which would rather
  tighly couple the infrastructure to the pim cvs module but keep stuff local
- a standalone module kdepimtests which testers could check out standalone

Should a kde wide qa/regression tests/functional tests infrastructure be 
deemed desireable by all of you, if would probably be a good idea to agree on 
formats early on and maybe decide on a place on kde.org for it.

Of course this only makes sense if the infrastructure is maintained and the 
tests are executed, so some kind of test team would need to be recruited. If 
we manage to communicate the difference in quality those folks could make, 
maybe all those "I can't code (yet) but want to help and don't want to 
translate" people could be motivated to contribute to this.

If people don't think this is realistic, we'll just try it out for kmail for 
now and see if it works. Just thought I'd propose it.

Till
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