Slashdot Mirror
Announcing the KDE Quality Team Project
Quique writes "The KDE Community is pleased to announce the launch of the Quality Team Project, a community of contributors who will serve as a gateway between developers and users in the KDE Project, and as a new way for people to begin contributing. KDE is a very attractive project, offering high quality software and is freely available. There is a lot of people who feel the urge to give something back, but stop in the middle of the way, frustrated by the steep learning curve. The aim of the project is to reduce these barriers by welcoming these potential contributors, and by offering documentation, support, and even guidance if requested. The objective is to support the new contributors, (programmers, documenters, testers, artists...). Have you ever wished to help KDE in some way, but never knew how? Keep reading!"
the KDE Kuality Team?
QA? Testing? This is what open source needs!
Allow me to use Slashdot as an example. Wednesday nights = push development into production. Anyone on the slashteam want to tell me what regression testing tools and system testers they use? Sure, usually (not always) there isn't a crash-and-burn build, but occasionally there is annoyances and such that are just 'thrown into' the build that people didn't know was coming and other things.
Granted, this is Robs code, let him do what he wants with it, but with a 'QA' step it just makes for a better product.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What abbreviation will this project get? KDE-Qt?
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
This seems like it's follwing on ESR's remarks on CUPS the other day but it's not. They've put a lot of planning into this including how to maintain your own CVS and which part of KDE to target for improvement first (KDE PIM).
I'd like to see some of the numerous UI critics take part in this. You know, the ones who write scathing reviews of widgets and fonts like Eurgenia?
This guy is way out there
What was that open source code auditting thing that DARPA set up, but noone showed up to do the gruntwork?
Sounds like KDE is looking for folks to come along and do all the thankless, boring shit. Spellchecking help files, testing obscure check boxes, applying different themes. Of course, all the cool design work and programming, and artistry, etc, will be done by the core team - who will, of course, accept all the credit.
Noone wants to do the monkey work. I don't want to test constantly, read bug reports, track down insignificant bugs in code thats unused 99.9% of the time. I only do so because it's my job.
Which is a shame for open source in general, because it's that QA step, all the thankless hours of gruntwork, that make the final product what it is.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Oh yeah...
Tom Smykowski: Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
I think this is exactly what open source needs. It's one thing for programmers, sysadmins and advanced users to contribute to open source projects, but there's often no easy way for the average user to help out.
With ideas like KDE Quality Team, the developers get to hear from the users and integrate features that they would like to see, as well as providing a means by which the average user can contribute. That's why Wikipedia works so well - it is possible for anybody to contribute. It's great to see the "anybody can contribute" idea extend to open source where up till now it's really only the advanced users who can contribute easily.
My operat~1 system unders~1 long filena~1 , does yours?
Linux version .01 was launched in September 1991. (timeline) Try 12.5 years.
... then I think you've underestimated that figure by a few decades.
Rather, if you mean the relative amount of time it seems that I've been thrashing around in the 'quirkiness' (to be polite) that is the linux desktop
Personally I think this is a very good idea. My programming skills are limited to simple BASH scripts so Im no use to most devel teams. But I do have good documentation/bug hunting skills. I do this as part of my job. So it is a good oppurtunity for those who do want to give something back to the OSS community but fall short in the programming area. Good Idea KDE.
right you are - but should it be that way? for newbies and technophobes -packages are the way they get stuff onto their machines
For fostering a community unlike any other. www.kde-look.org has been my first stop to see modern ideas on desktop design for years now. I am not nor have I ever been a KDE fanboy (I'm a Blackbox user) but they have managed to form a remarkable bond with the graphics design community (and the graphically inclined). They should be a model for more OSS projects and this is something we should look at as a community as a whole. There is more to good software then 1's and 0's.
Quack, quack.
ESR did bring up a lot of good points. However, I doubt this team will have too much to do with that. From the article, it seems to me that it's mostly focused at lowering the entry level requirements for working on the KDE project. They are trying to get people to write documentation, etc. But that doesn't mean that they will actually focus on ensuring that it will all be as simple to use as Windows.
As an open source author and member of a quality assurance team, experience tells me that the greatest effort will go into programming. QA teams generally have enough work to do just fixing bugs, writing documentation and testing releases ("important stuff"), that not enough time is left for making the user interface uniform or even intuitive. In this case, though they are asking users for direct input on the topic. That's a good sign.
I don't know where you guys are coming from. I've submitted a few bugs to bugs.kde.org, and I've never gotten harsh feedback. Even once when I committed the death sin of accidentally posting a duplicate (bug that were already submitted, but I didn't notice), I was still treated kindly and pointed to the other bug where, in the comments, one of the core developers pasted in my somewhat different suggestion for a solution for the record.
;).
It is my experience also from the IRC channel that the KDE developers are great guys and girls -- a few of them even hang out and help users with their stupid problems (ok, s/users/me/, s/their/my/
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Being a 10 year veteran of QA/Testing and holding a CS degree, I have long wondered where QA would fit into OSS. And by "QA" I don't just mean testing, there is a lot more to it than that. Here are some topics that would need to be addressed:
What is the development process? Is it documented?
What types of estimation procedures do you do?
What is the SCM process? Is it documented?
What is the review/inspection process for all artifacts?
Are there software requirements? Are they inspected/reviewed?
Are there development plans/design docs? Are they inspected/reviewed?
Are there code reviews?
What are your defect escape rates?
What is your plan for alpha/beta testing?
What is your release schedule?
I think I could go on, but you get the idea. If you want solid, defect-finding, QA people who can improve your product, you'll be asked questions like these. If you just want someone who will run a few regression tests against your product before you put it on a website, then you are looking for some software testers. I am not saying that all of those things are necessary, but they might be. Maybe all of this stuff is archaic and applies only to the proprietary model, I don't know. I know that is what I have worked in for the last 10 years. I don't know if anyone has asked these questions of an OSS project, or done any research into if they need to be asked.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
KDE has User Interface Guidelines since more than 4 years. These guidelines are a bit outdated, but they are followed by almost all applications within KDE. This is one of the reasons why KDE applications are quite consistent with each other. KDE has been dedicated towards usability since its foundation, but usability was never the only goal. KDE was never perfect, but its usability has been constantly improving every version. Compared to most other PC software, KDE has always been doing reasonably well in terms of usability.
True. The GNOME project made a good decision when they introduced HIG, even if many GNOME users were very angry at the time. Removing functionality was one of the main methods of solving GNOME's early usability problems, which should only be done if there is really no other way to solve usability problems.
Most people complaining about KDE's usability are suggesting the same strategy for KDE. I don't agree with this. Solving usability issues in other ways is more difficult and takes more time, but the end result will be better if we stop telling others "I know better than you that you don't need this". But anyway, I agree that having good user interface guidelines is important.
My impression is very different. The Quality team idea has been greeted with a lot of very positive responses among the KDE developers. There is a lot of interest in this within the KDE project.
I am the one who is currently putting the most effort into the KDE Quality Team implementation, so I am qualified to speak for the project:
Let's start by making something clear:
The main idea is not to build a QA project inside KDE. The main idea is to support and embrace new contributors with any background, and help to organize their efforts. For instance: Any doubts about the docbook? We are glad to help. Do you want feedback on your work? We are happy to provide. Looking for guidance? Hop in!
We don't want to point what is good for you: we try to present you with a long list of things one can do to help, and organize these efforts.
The recommended approach for non programmers is different from other projects: it is more like the project manager in a company than of a task specialist. In other words think of acting upon the whole of Kontact instead of acting upon the context help for the whole KDE project. We recognize that the main tool for helping an application is knowing it well. A quick look at the activities list, presenting the requirements for performing the tasks, is sufficient to prove that.
http://quality.kde.org/develop/modules/
Yes, the activities include QA. But this is just one of the activities. Hope this helps to avoid confusion with GNOME's bugsquad (also nice, but not related: it is a different concept).