A few words about the Quality of KDE 4.2

[Kevin Krammer]

On Wednesday 18 March 2009, James Richard Tyrer wrote:

> It appears to me that in many cases that basic TQM could solve the
> problems.  For those that don't know what TQM means, it starts with the
> philosophy that the way to have a quality product is to build it
> correctly rather than build it, inspect it, and fix what is wrong.  With
> software, this means that the person writing the code should do basic
> testing before committing the code.

Fortunately this is standard procedure.
Nobody commits code to trunk without having tested it themselves. I'd actually 
wonder if this happens at all, even in personal branches.

Since anything more than one developer is working on gets tested from 
different angles, coverage is also quite good.
Of course lesser shared code gets less testing, but its probably still 
applicable.

It is probably possible to increase this by doing more pre-commit review 
and/or staging branches. Some sub projects actually do the former through 
their reviewboards and the latter will probably be a nice side effect of the 
switch to a more branch and merge friendly version control system.

> Other issues (project wide issues) are more complicated.  The current
> branching method results in stuff that isn't ready for prime time being
> released.  What is needed is a methodology that prevents this from
> happening.  This sounds like a tautology, but it is a very controversial
> idea in the KDE development community.

Right, which is why a switch to a version control system with better 
branch/merge handling is basically agree on. Unfortunately this new kind of 
systems are a bit harder to understand, so hopefully non-coding contributors 
like translators will still be able to access it on their own.

Even for coders it's a bit taunting since working with multiple feature 
branches requires a different approach for various tasks. However I think 
that the benefits in the long run outweight the short term burdens.

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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