[Qgis-developer] Rethinking the testing and release procedure of QGIS

[Tim Sutton]

Hi Andreas and others


I wrote a bit of an essay on this a week or two back:
http://linfiniti.com/2011/06/some-thoughts-on-the-future-of-qgis/

Believe me we have tried just about every suggestion including having
a policy of unit tests for new features and bug fixes. The truth is
that until we have undirected funding sufficient for the project to
employ some of us developers to work full time on QGIS, things will
probably never improve - developers need to earn a living which means
they do work on QGIS based on client requirements or do other work and
work on QGIS in their spare time. Most clients don't mandate tests be
written to accompany the work they commission. With so many things
that need working on, testing etc just doesnt attract the attention it
should. So the idea of creating some kind of fund that is aimed at
having a group of developers working full time on stabilising and
professionalising QGIS is where we need to head for. I have already
been having some behind the scenes discussions with potential funding
sources on this, but so far nothing has materialised. I believe in the
future it will come to pass that we can do this. From your side you
can help too - when you contract developers to create new features,
mandate unit tests to be part of the deliverables. If every
organisation who was paying to add functionality to QGIS did this we
would already be in a lot better  shape!

Regards

Tim

On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 10:51 AM, Sandro Santilli <strk at keybit.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 02, 2011 at 09:32:14AM +0200, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
>> Il 30/06/2011 21:55, Andreas Neumann ha scritto:
>>
>> > Maybe the establishment of a testing infrastructure, as proposed by Strk
>> > and others, would also help to maintain/raise the quality.
>>
>> Agreed: AFAICT this is a major task: any idea of how much work would be necessary for
>> reasonable results? An order of magnitude would be enough for now.
>
> I belive a 30k figure might get things going far enough that developers
> could have a policy of no functional change and no bugfix w/out a test
> accompanying would be allowed.
>
> --strk;
>
>  ()   Free GIS & Flash consultant/developer
>  /\   http://strk.keybit.net/services.html
> _______________________________________________
> Qgis-developer mailing list
> Qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
>



-- 
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
==============================================
Please do not email me off-list with technical
support questions. Using the lists will gain
more exposure for your issues and the knowledge
surrounding your issue will be shared with all.

Visit http://linfiniti.com to find out about:
 * QGIS programming and support services
 * Mapserver and PostGIS based hosting plans
 * FOSS Consulting Services
Skype: timlinux
Irc: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net
==============================================