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

[Andreas Neumann]

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Hi all,

Please regard my email as constructive criticism. This is as much a
criticism of the users (including myself) as it is on the developers. It
is my impression that the users are not testing QGIS trunk enough before
the release, but they complain after the release.

I am having serious concerns with the quality of the final QGIS 1.7
release as it currently stands. I have to say that I am usually using
trunk. The trunk version, it seems to me, has fewer issues than the
release versions. Also it seems, that the self-compiled trunk version
works fine, but the Ubuntu packages may have problems. Then there are
the PDF/printing issues on Windows ... which are major problems to many
people.

I think we should, in the future, first release a beta-version and test
it for a couple of days/weeks before we call it a final release. Also,
we should do - much more - testing. Testing is the task of the power
users, not so much the developers. And we need testers, not only on
Linux, but also on Windows and Mac. While many devs are on Linux, the
majority of the QGIS users work on Windows.

Maybe the establishment of a testing infrastructure, as proposed by Strk
and others, would also help to maintain/raise the quality.

Another idea is to collect money (something like a membership fee
(voluntary, but expected from users who use QGIS a lot)) and pay QA
people. With the fast growing QGIS user base it should be possible to
collect enough money for such a task.

It is my impression that the current state of the 1.7 version with all
the major issues hurts the reputation of QGIS. We need to act and make
sure that this does not happen again. The QGIS team has to become more
professional if it wants to grow its user base and doesn't want to loose
their users. This includes boring tasks, such as QA.

Any thoughts?

Andreas
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