Please add a tool to let users rate kde apps

[Adriaan de Groot]

On Saturday 27 January 2007 20:06, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Saturday 27 January 2007 6:32, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> > 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.
>
> i just found out about this the other day:
>
> 	http://developer.kde.org/quality-check/

The nice thing about that list is that it takes the "messy user bit" out of 
the equation -- it's all about the code. The stuff that goes into the 
product, not the result or the feasibility of the product.

[[ I'm reminded of a cooking metaphor: this list checks that all the 
ingredients that go in are good: excellent quality milk, good chili peppers, 
chocolate acceptable, high quality spinach, molasses, soy sauce, anchovies 
and beer. Puree until done. Whether the end result is tasty or good for 
anything is outside the scope of the evaluation. ]]

That leaves the original spirit of the proposal in this thread -- rate apps 
based on user input -- out in the cold. Of course we've been traditionally 
hesitant to accept too much user feedback simply because we don't have any 
mechanisms to handle the amount that might be expected.

> it's certainly not comprehensive at this point and not being used by most
> apps. fleshing it out, finding people who could take care of various
> aspects of rating ... and it could be a nice tool in this manner.

It's a good start. I *vaguely* remember reading about it when the initiative 
was started. It's somewhat EBNish in nature: list of criteria and a checking 
mechanism. Granted, the checking mechanism is manual :)

> what i would caution against is people who might try and rate it based on
> their own personal experience (good or bad) versus having a holistic view
> of the application.

Fortunately you can't rate the criteria on that list "Kiosk ready" 
subjectively (ha!). If there were entries like "usable" or "ready for the 
enterprise" then there'd be much more dissension.

Which returns us to the original suggestion: a rating app. I'd be all for the 
development of such an app in order to experiment with the idea. Webspace and 
SVN is no problem (I'd dump it in CodeYard to start with, that's cheap and 
useful). I can see it now: on exit, KDE apps will start to query (in 1/3 of 
the cases) "Did application <foo> meet your needs today?"

-- 
KDE Quality Team  http://www.englishbreakfastnetwork.org/
GPG: FEA2 A3FE    http://people.fruitsalad.org/adridg/