The kde-quality project and mailing list

[Carlos Leonhard Woelz]

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005 08:30:30 -0600, "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo at kde.org>
said:
> On Monday 15 August 2005 08:07, Carlos Leonhard Woelz wrote:
> > 3) The project did not produce a group of non developers that help with
> > different parts of the applications, with the exception of 3/4 people
> > (me included), as we aimed to.
> 
> this is an interesting point. what sort of non-developer input should we
> be aiming for here? art? documentation? testing? promo? defining those
> goals first might help us arrive at a way to achieve them.

Documentation and context help (whatsthis) are an excellent starting
point, because it makes sure that the new contributor *really*
know about the application.

But the main idea was to care for one project or application
in many areas, so it's in fact a different concept from
the kde-artists or the open-usability effort. There are
lot's of interesting things to do that do not require people to be
developers, just to know well the application, and care for it. 

If you know well the app, you can do bug triage, usability testing,
guidelines conformance testing, write docs, context help, promote
the app, draw artwork, all this without a line of code.
The point is that you can really leverage the knowledge about an
app/module.

A good example: myself. I wrote kpilot, cervisia, kdesvn-build,
(and korganizer) docs, context help for korg and kpilot, kpilot
sync icons (they suck), started the first kde-look contest,
usability testing for korg and kpilot, some bug management and
testing for korg and kpilot, an article on osnews about cervisia.

Quoting the original manifest:

<quote>

The main idea is to create a community based quality team of non
developers, that would focus on the whole of individual modules of
applications, working orthogonally to developers, documenters, users and
testers, instead of the specific of the whole. In other words think of
acting upon the whole of Kontact instead of acting upon the whatsthis of
KDE project. The key idea is attracting people in a way thats both
interesting to them and more useful to KDE project. This would be the
basis of a community oriented (instead of company oriented)  effort of
improving this experience. We have a wonderful community, kde-look.org,
KDE wiki and all the translating teams are strong evidence of this.

</quote>

And just to prove I never meant kde-quality to be about Quality
Assurance:

<quote>

I was questioned if this could evolve to help building a quality
assurance program, but I am not sure about it, as I don't know if we can
maintain the interest for the volunteers in this very formal process,
and I don't even know if the team a can be useful in a QA program. A QA
program involves the formulation of the standards and test requirements
the software has to meet (specification), the methods to test the
conformance with the specification (test cases and test suites) and the
validation of the results. It is an extensively documented and technical
process. So this is not the focus of the proposal. But if someone thinks
there is a useful way to link the two, I would be glad to know.

</quote>

Cheers,

Carlos Woelz