Massive Konqueror Regression

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 18 August 2005 11:22, Geoffrey Huang wrote:
> I realize I'm jumping into the middle of the conversation here, but
> quality is something I feel strongly about.  W.r.t. Aaron's call for
> more human testers, I agree that that certainly would help.  However, I
> don't believe you can guarantee quality just by asking people to use a
> pre-release version. 

in the real world, when producing mass market software one can't guarantee 
quality, per say. one can only create mechanisms that help ensure quality. 
automated regression testing is one tool that covers some of the problem, and 
for the parts it can cover it's invaluable.

> Quality -- that is to say, the prevention of 
> regressions -- relies on repeatable tasks for sane results.  This means,
> of course, that the human testers would need to follow a fairly rigorous
> test plan.

this is true if we have just a few people doing it. if there were enough 
people using KDE from SVN on a day to day basis, statistically we'd get 
rather good coverage. but if we had a small number of very active testers 
(e.g. a q/a department that was funded) then building task lists would be the 
first order of business.

> To be honest, it really makes more sense to me to automate regression
> tests, and have humans concentrate on testing new features. 

it's not an either/or ... regression testing where that makes sense ought to 
be done. i don't think anyone has an issue with that. those tests that are 
missing still need to be written, of course. but i'd be happy to see you 
manage to automate the regression testing of handheld devices with kpilot, or 
automate the regression testing of much of kicker.

> I've done 
> automated UI testing before, albeit on Windows.  Are there no UI testing
> tools that KDE could use?

none that i'm aware of that are useful to the project (e.g. open source, work 
with Qt/KDE classes, etc)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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