[Qgis-developer] Better bug squashing

[Ivan Mincik]

Hi devs,
with all respect to Your good work, I would like to redraw the topic
about 'What can we do to make bug squashing better, quicker, smoother
and more complete'.

Few days ago, I was discussing several people about possible
solutions, which can solve the problem of increasing number of
unclosed bug reports which are degrading devs work and user
impression.

We came with following ideas:
1. Employ some new C++/Qt devs in software companies using QGIS and
dedicate them to bug fixing.
Hm, if I can speak for my small company, currently with zero C++ devs,
our financial limit would be partial employment of some skilled local
dev. Furthermore, there is very long entry period to get knowledge of
technology and forcing people to fix other people's bugs can not be
good idea and can produce other bugs. Also it can be very time
uneffective. Either You are regular QGIS dev, or You can not do any
bigger coding. This is not good idea.

2. Ask existing regular QGIS devs if they can spend more time with
bugs, when we would collect some money covering their time.
Again, if I can speak for my small company (located in poor EU country
:)), we are able to send for example 100 EUR each month to bug fixing
budget. If few other companies will join, we can have two half time
employed devs solving bugs. Are there any hardcore devs interested ?
What hourly rate do You expect ?

3. Employ some new C++/Qt dev and dedicate him to create complete test suite.
If new people are not good in bug fixing, they can be good to create
good test suite for all basic parts of QGIS. Is there anybody able to
design such tests and mentor developing ? We can find some skilled
students for this task or pay dev from one time public budget
collection.

4. Establish QGIS QA team
Establish QGIS QA team and group of testers to regulary test every
supported platform against latest trunk. We would quickly address new
regression to responsible developer with full debug and gdb backtrace
info. Each tester would be responsible to one platform and some
limited part of software features.
We would needed:
   - to reevaluate supported libraries versions and operating systems
   - to reevaluate supported software features and data sources


What do You think ?

Ivan Mincik
Gista s.r.o.