Setting up a Quality Team within KDE

[Anne-Marie Mahfouf]

On 04/06/2012 02:23 PM, Aleix Pol wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 1:42 PM, Anne-Marie Mahfouf
> <annemarie.mahfouf at free.fr>  wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> We would like to setup a Quality Testing Team within KDE in order to better
>> test our next KDE SC and make the beta process more efficient.
>> Attached is the first draft of the ideas I brainstormed. Source .odt of this
>> document is available at
>> http://quickgit.kde.org/index.php?p=scratch%2Fannma%2Fquality-testing-doc.git
>>
>> (We can make it a public Google doc if it is more convenient or an
>> etherpad).
>>
>> The document roughly describes 2 areas of action:
>> - reinforcement (labelled "Reinforce") of existing structures (mainly
>> targetted to developers and mainly relevant before the beta stage of the
>> release). This could
>>
>> be used as guidelines for new developers. Of course it won't be newbies
>> which will develop Unit Tests or check the code quality. But some guidelines
>> can
>> be useful for libs outside Frameworks.
>> An area of relevant reinforcement that can be currently done is the Review
>> process for new integration.
>> - new infra-structures: this is labelled "New" in the doc: this is what I
>> would see to happen for the 4.9 release.
>>
>>
>> A new mailing list has been set up in order to discuss all this: please
>> subscribe to it if you would like to be part of this
>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-testing
>> An IRC channel also was created on Freenode:
>> #kde-quality
>>
>> Please join the mailing list and the IRC channel so we can setup a plan to
>> start putting all this in gear!
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>>
>> Anne-Marie and Myriam
> Hi!
> I think this project is a very interesting idea and definitely
> something we need. Said that, I'd like to propose some small changes
> on how this should be done.
>
> In the document there are some actions to be taken that sound a bit
> too technical, for example it specifies reinforcing the unit testing.
> This is something that we should have been doing already and I don't
> see someone from the Quality Team going to a development team and
> improving that.
Making unit tests is the developer task (and the document mentions it) 
and we do have solit Unit Tests in kdelibs and Frameworks and 
kdepimlibs. However there are other libs within KDE where maybe unit 
tests are not as present as they should (I did not research that 
though). Also, about unit tests, it's not only writing them, it's also 
running them. This is not done in a regular basis and needs to be 
automated in the future and the fails need to be fixed.
No newbie will ever touch to any Unit Tests of course. And any action 
will be discussed with the gurus in this field (/me does not point to 
David).

We have many tools for developers which are not fully used: latest great 
tool is Jenkins which I was aware of only recently. My label "Reinforce" 
is to take full advantage of those existing tools.

(It would be cool if at Akademy there are some talks focusing on using 
these tools.)

> What I'd like to see is this new team testing KDE and its applications
> from a user perspective, specifying the different perspectives the KDE
> end user will face (different OS, different form factors, etc) and
> reporting problems (not necessarily bugs, as in crashes) and proposing
> new solutions.
This is addressed for 4.9 as "putting in place a few selected areas of 
functional testing" and hopefully we will assess some automated UI 
testing tools and start using them in the following releases. I hope we 
can gather enough beta testers and make this working.
> I'm really hopeful about such a team, I think it's a good opportunity
> for KDE to be able to reach contributions for a less common sector of
> our community and keep working together for a greater KDE experience.
>
> Cheers!
> Aleix
>
Thanks for your input!

Anne-Marie