[Qgis-psc] On finances

[Paolo Cavallini]

Hi Nyall,

On 12/4/18 12:18 AM, Nyall Dawson wrote:
>
> QGIS devs now have a innate culture that unit tests are just a "part
> of business as usual", and it's EXTREMELY rare to see a pull request
> today without any unit tests included. While it's an easy answer to
> cry "more unit tests" -- I honestly don't see how we COULD do more
> than we already do. The unit testing battle has already been won --
> we've a library of thousands and thousands of tests, with very good
> test coverage of the core QGIS functionality.
>
> ...
>
> So unfortunately, that doesn't leave us with any easy answers here. My
> 2c would be that it comes down to wider USER testing of the
> prereleases, and maybe a compulsory "hard freeze" period before the
> final releases are packaged. At least, the major regressions that I'm
> aware of from 3.4 would never have been covered by unit tests, even if
> we spent years solely writing tests and nothing else. They were simply
> too dependant on platform specific issues and app level UI
> functionality.

Thanks for this overview. Lights and shadows here: from one side, it is
quite reassuring that you believe we are doing well for QA, which once
upon a time was a weak point for us. Unfortunately, bugs are still
flocking in (BTW, it would be good to have statistics about that,
especially the rate of opening and closing of tickets over time).

We concluded many times that the crucial point is to have better user
testing, and this is mostly a matter of communicating it effectively, to
convince people to use the pre-release, during the hard freeze, that I
agree it should be extended, and report bugs. I believe an easier
availability and clear wording could help here.

All the best.

-- 
Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
QGIS.ORG Chair:
http://planet.qgis.org/planet/user/28/tag/qgis%20board/