Setting up a Quality Team within KDE

[Tomaz Canabrava]

On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:03 PM, Anne-Marie Mahfouf
<annemarie.mahfouf at free.fr> wrote:
> 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
>

Already Got in contact with the Free Software group of my old
university to see if they can help with manpower for that. :)