This is planned to be the first one of a series of articles about
how Quality Assurance is done in various Open Source projects
with a focus on Automated Testing.
Projects
I'll try to review several kinds of software. I'll start with
Perl 5, CPAN, Parrot and Perl 6 as I am more familiar with these
projects but I'll try to do all kinds of other software.
Among the planned projects are
PostgresSQL,
Apache,
Mozilla,
Subversion
but I would also like to check out some technologies
such as XORP, the Open
Source Router and the
Vyatta Router / Firewall
based on it. Other suggestions are welcome too. contact me
The audience
The audience is two fold. On one hand I would like to
get more people involved in testing and development
of Open Source Software, on the other hand these case
studies can be used by QA managers of commercial entities
developing closed source applications to learn how testing
is done in the Open Source world.
Content
While the focus of these articles is the testing phase it is
many times easier to understand how it works if we see
the whole development process of the application.
Especially as in most of the cases testing is integrated in
the development process of the applications and is done during
development time.
So the issues I'll try to look at are:
Who are the developers?
Who has the right to commit to the version control system?
Which version control system are they using?
Who makes the decisions in the project?
What bug-tracking system do they use?
What versions of the software are supported?
Is there a test suit for automated tests?
Are they running smoke test?
Where are the test reports?
How easy is it to setup smoke testing?
Do they have centralized management of the testing effort
or is it distributed?