I would be happy to assist. I actually work in the field of consumer software products and support about 10 myself as well as write up documentation. I subscribed to the list so let me know.
-Chad
Cool, you guys! But don’t be put off if you don’t hear from the QA guys. This thread was over two years old when you found it, and there’s no guarantee they’re following it any more. You might check out that mailing list that’s mentioned above, and see where it went from there.
I was the one that posted this a couple of years ago. I was going to attempt to establish a formal QA process as part of the release process by wedging a test cycle in between the dev and release cycles. The way the Haiku functions, it’s not condusive for such a process to be implemented. It was probably a lofty goal that I wasn’t going to be able to give the time necessary to make successful. For those of you wanting to help with testing, there are dedicated members of Haiku that test builds all the time and you can reach out to them for guidance. There should be some documentation somewhere on how to get started.
On another note, I am looking forward to the Haiku beta!
Hi all,
Sorry to take nearly a week to respond, but the Google Code-In has been the busiest it has ever been and Haiku has been the most popular mentor organisation by far!
I was officially asked to investigate QA for Haiku in 2012, but I had to wait until early 2013 to do so as I was too busy with university exams.
I found that in order to integrate QA with the current process, Haiku would need to have a tool that could connect to trac and submit tickets. The tool would need to be simple enough for people unfamiliar with QA to use, but powerful enough to handle a whole operating system. Lastly Haiku inc. is a non-profit organisation with highly constrained budget, so the software would need to be open source or, less preferably, free for open source/non-profit projects.
Although there are a lot of QA test management tools out there, they are ridiculously complicated to use or ridiculously expensive to buy.
There are a few exceptions, but they do not connect to trac and it would be rather annoying to transfer valid tickets over to trac all the time. Still it would be nonetheless possible if we can put up with that. It is just that it is made difficult by trac not coming with an API by default; requiring the need to install a dodgy 3rd party API implementation.
There are some highly polished QA tools that although are commercial solutions, are also free for open source/non-profit projects, but that still requires web hosting. This can be gained from the likes of dreamhost’s free hosting for non-profits or on the dedicated Haiku Inc. server (although that is really only for core services).
I kind of gave up after this, but I have added a few tasks in GCI for students to write some test suites for some of the core apps. I just have to wait for Scott to ok them so they can be published.
When investigation Atlassian Crowd (to create a HaikuID system), I came across a couple of test management add-ons for Atlassian Jira. If you simplify Jira by turning off its advanced features, you can make it look and feel like Bitbucket (they are after all a subsidiary of Atlassin), so if you can use Bitbucket you can use these add-ons. These tools are all free for permissive licensed open source projects, but unfortunately the QA tools can only be self hosted and not hosted by Atlassian On-demand (their cloud service).
Anyway check out some of the videos of the add-ons: