[Qgis-user] Crowdfunding Project: Automated tests for QGIS

[Matthias Kuhn]

Dear QGIS users,

I started a crowd-funding campaign for automated unit tests in QGIS. 
Please consider to help funding this project in order to improve the 
software and code quality in the long run. More details can be found on 
the project page and in the text below.

http://blog.vitu.ch/10102014-1046/crowdfunding-initiative-automated-testing

I plan to improve the quality of QGIS sustainably by introducing the 
automatic execution of test procedures which will inform responsible 
developers automatically in case of failure. Your support for this 
project is highly welcome and you can contribute to make QGIS more 
stable in the long run. To implement the necessary changes as well as 
repairing currently broken tests a minimal amount of CHF 5000.- will be 
required. The following paragraphs will describe the project in more detail.

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In the last years, QGIS matured from a hobby project to a serious 
alternative with a broad scope of possibilities and a great potential.

With the constant addition of new features new possibilities have been 
created and still are created. Every new feature means changes to the 
source code of the software and is a potential source of errors.

There are possibilities to automatically detect errors. This is done by 
executing a series of operations with known result. If a operation does 
not return the desired (known) result something went wrong and it needs 
to be evaulated why.

QGIS has currently over 100 different tests. However, these are not run 
regularly and nobody realizes when tests fail. This led to the 
situation, that at the moment approximately 2/3 of the tests do not 
report success and nobody knows why and since when.

I intend to take the following measures to ensure that in the future 
tests no longer can silently fail:

* tests will be run on all source code changes in master (main 
development branch)

* tests will be run on all pull requests (changes being evaluated for 
integration in master)

* if tests fail the responsible developers will be notified by mail

* with symbols, the current state of the tests will be indicated

With this system it is possible to react instantaneously when tests fail 
and to revert the responsible changes or to not even integrate these.

To make sure that this system works and is accepted, it is important to 
start with a working suite of tests. How much time it takes to fix all 
tests is difficult to say. The plan is therefore to fix as many tests 
with the available funds and to disable the rest of the tests in the 
first time. Therefore additional funds that are provided on top of the 
required minimum CHF 5000.- will be very welcome for additional working 
tests.

It would be great if this crowd-funding effort could help to get this 
project to fly.

Kind regards,

Matthias Kuhn
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