Please add a tool to let users rate kde apps

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Friday 26 January 2007 13:51:41 Juergen Pfennig wrote:
> I write this in the hope that Adriaan will not find it off-topic ...

While Adriaan *may* find this offtopic, he's not listadmin, and most certainly 
not $GOD (still close to both, though).

> I'm a KDE user (and a little bit a contributor) since long time. In most
> cases the app quality got better over time but there are still a lot of
> apps that cannot be recommend for an office desktop system (kmail for
> example). Such apps typically only grow along the feature axis but loose
> stability and/or performance. Someone new to KDE cannot know this in
> advance. This might lead to considerable disappointment, lost time and lost
> money.
>
> What about introducing a KDE-offical rating system that tells users if an
> app is stable, and if it can be recommended for a production environment?
> This could help real-world users to select the right applications for their
> business and could also help developers.
>
> kdirstat has a feedback dialog, but this is not what I am talking of.

There is surely a valid core in this proposal. It makes sense to rate 
applications based on a number of criteria. One could think of a metric based 
on:

- Number and severity of bugs in different categories
- Adherence to usability guidelines
- Coverage of APIDOX
- Adherence to coding guidelines
- Results from analysis with various static analysis tools (e.g. findbugs, 
  coverity, etc.)
- ...

You also certainly would want to interpolate that with the use case at hand. 
It's pretty much impossible to rate a software in a generic way, it always 
depends on the use case.

I think the KDE community would very much welcome such a way of measuring the 
(perceived?) quality of applications, not at least because measuring is an 
important step towards improvement.
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Accident, n.:	A condition in which presence of mind is good, but absence of 
body is better.  - Foolish Dictionary

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 481 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-quality/attachments/20070127/a4085b85/attachment.pgp