I have brought up this idea in the past on the Haiku mailing list, but didn’t get real takers at that time. I decided I’d post the idea here. Is there anybody (including the project leads and developers of the Haiku project) interested in assembling a QA (testing) team? I would like to get involved in the testing side of things and help out where I can. I actually do QA (testing) for a living for a language learning software company here in the US. I actually deal with back-end systems that support various client applications, so I’m always beating around on some random operating system whether it’s Windows, Mac OS X and/or Linux with testing integration, etc…
I think the QA (testing) team could…
help manage the defects cataloged and re-test them to see if they’re still valid
write simplified test cases based on requirements and use cases
support testing life cycles prior to a release
help coordinate (and recruit for?) alpha and beta testing
etc…
I know some developers would prefer QA testers to also fix bugs and though I have some coding skills myself; I’d prefer not to delve into the Haiku code base until I’m more experienced with C/C++ and have the confidence to do such things.
Anyone else have ideas or opinions on this subject??
I think that’s a great way for anyone who’s motivated to help develop Haiku but isn’t a software developer to get involved. Anything that can help Haiku become more stable is welcome.
What software would you use to organize the tests? Bonus points if it works in Haiku!
If it’s web-based then Haiku should be fine, if the desire was some native rich client type testcase management tool, then that’d have to be written from scratch.
You can count me in on the testing side also. I have decided I am going to try and learn c++, but that is going to take quite a while and I would like to help out how I can now.
I guess I wanted to reach out to the Haiku core developers and gauge their interest in such an initiative. Does the Haiku project want/need a dedicated QA (testing) team?
I have some QA testing experience and though not a programming/developing guru, I’d enjoy a chance to give back to the Haiku community with my (limited) time in this way. I am also located in the US (Boston area).
For a long time I’ve wanted to create some sort of automated or at least semi-automated testing of Haiku applications. The idea would be to use Haiku’s existing scripting architecture (inherited from BeOS) to start applications, send them messages to do stuff, and then see if they work as intended. Doing this in a fully automated fashion could be tricky, but doing it semi-automated might be better than nothing (and it would certainly be a good start.)
In that case the idea would be that the QA person would run the test suite for a program, and then there would be a prompt indicating what should have happened, and the QA person can say “Yes” or “No” to that prompt. If the desired behavior was not seen, that issue can be noted by the test running program.
I think the biggest part of any such system would be the actual test suites, which is where this becomes more relevent for this thread!
A QA team could come up with these test suites for Haiku and for each included application. A machine-readable format like the Cucumber framework from the Ruby world might be nice, because that easily allows for the adding of the semi or full test automation mentioned above.
I haven’t yet looked deeply at the Trac plugins already mentioned here, or exactly what Ubuntu has on their QA site, but of course having some sort of online presense for these test suites would be nice.
Test automation would be great if Haiku has good support for such, which I haven’t looked into myself (I will check out your link). I do have experience with Selenium for test automation against web applications, but that’s the extent of it. I have heard of Cucumber as one of the developers where I work did a tech talk on it, which seemed to me was a great tool for writing automated tests to validate that developers coded to given set of requirements and I think one of the product owners from one of our dev teams was using Cucumber for just that purpose.
There has been active discussion on the mailing list on this very subject and it seems to be getting the necessary blessing and support of the Haiku Dev team. I am still trying to work out details with those of influence and will either start a new thread to try and recruit a QA team from there or will extend this one for the same purpose. Anyways, for those interested in joining, just keep checking here on the forums. Thanks!
I’m still going to pursue this. I just got back from vacation today and I’ll probably be posting another thread on the subject with more formal details. Watch out for that one.
