Setting up a Quality Team within KDE

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Friday 06 April 2012, Anne-Marie Mahfouf 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-do
> >> c.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.)

There is not only Jenkins, but also CDash, which integrates nicely with our 
cmake-based build system.

I was trying to set up nightly builds for the KDE modules two years ago or so 
(hosted on http://my.cdash.org, some of our projects are actually using it), 
gave a talk at Akademy in Tampere and tried really hard, but there was not 
much response to it.

Alex