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Software Carpentry QMTest Testing Tool Released

Posted by timothy on from the building-a-better-bugtrap dept.

soundsop writes: "The first tool resulting from the winners of a design competition by the Software Carpentry project has been released. The QMTest tool is a testing tool to replace software such as XUnit, Expect and DejaGnu. An issue tracking tool, called QMTrack (a la Bugzilla) is forthcoming. It looks like the winning design proposals for a config tool (autoconf replacement) and a build tool (make replacement) are not being implemented."

1 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. big design up front by sohp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So they've gathered a lot of requirements and done a lot design, but, as the lady says, "Where's the beef?" Why do all this work to replace open source tools that already exist? Why not take those tools and contribute back to them, or if the project owners don't like the contributions, take the things they like and build from there?

    Perhaps this from their web page: "The Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory is providing $860,000 of funding for Software Carpentry, which is being administered by Code Sourcery, LLC." And this: CodeSourcery also provides training and strategic consulting services for companies considering the adoption of free or open source software.

    Why use the MIT License? Why develop in Python? Why require that the submissions to the design competition not contain any source code? They require a language but not any source? Am I being too cynical in seeing how, after all this contributed design, coding, testing, etc is done, at taxpayer expense, Code Sourcery is now in a tremendous position as the sole-source solution for support and training to the shops that choose to use these tools? And to notice that choosing the MIT license allows them to take and wrap up all the source code into their products and not give back anything? These are questions that either are in the FAQ but not clearly answered, or not spoken about. Even the SC site itself has been retired and archived.

    Thanks, I'll stick with XUnit, Bugzilla, cvs (and subversion when it's ready. For build config tools, well, if you do cross-platform C and C++, then autoconf or its successor, but that's just for one language and set of development requirements.

    I'll be interested to see if anything widely used comes out of this exercise. So far, of the all the tools implementations promised for "Summer of 2001", we have QMTest 1.0. The rest? Late and unfinished.