[openbeos] Re: Quality Assurance

Niels Reedijk <niels.reedijk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I've always been intrigued by quality assurance and the lack of it in
> Open Source Software. At the current rate of developments we are
> propelling towards the first generation of alpha and beta builds, and
> man, will these get attention. The downside of this, is that the
> project isn't ready to handle that yet. I've made several 
> observations
> on the issue, and I've posted these on my web-log 
> (http://nielx.blogspot.com)

While I agree with you that QA is a critical point, I don't see how we 
could realize a system you are proposing - if we had QA people that 
qualified, they would probably be coding themselves.
We should definitely have a QA team, though, and it should start 
setting up those tinderboxes, as well as making sure our unit tests 
work as expected. If anyone is interested in setting something like 
this up for us, be welcomed.

And while alpha/beta releases might not always be a good replacement 
for inhouse testing, it's pretty important to us, as we probably can't 
buy all the hardware that is out there (and even test them in all 
possible configurations). That's a special attribute of OS and driver 
development, though.

What I could imagine, though, is something you also mentioned in your 
text more or less: that a QA team will try to reproduce the bug, or 
resolve any issues in a bug report. Then they could either acknowledge 
the bug, or remove it. The developers would only get to the 
acknowledged and complete bug reports, so that they can start fix it 
right away. That would lower the requirements for the QA team quite a 
lot, and would still help the development process as well.

Bye,
   Axel.

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