The main purpose of this Blog
The main purpose of Quality Open Source Blog is to engage people like you in discussions on the growing challenge of Open Source Quality Assurance and look at the best ways to advance and improve methodologies and to determine the best practices.
As Open Source solutions continue to evolve at an amazing pace, the ways in which quality assurance and testing are conducted must keep the same pace to avoid the fate of becoming obsolete , it is a fact that end users world wide are seeking Open source software that are reliable and secure, hence of High Quality.
I believe that marketing Open Source is no longer the pressing issue, but rather QA as the Open Source marketplace matures, and is gaining momentum .
With your involvement , I hope to explore these and many other questions facing the Open source industry software development.
Thanks for your time ;)
posted by Karim at 4:44 AM
1 Comments:
Karim,
I wish you good luck in this initiative. It's definitely a very interesting question: how to measure and, possibly improve, the quality of Open Source code?
Quality Assurance is traditionally a set of processes to do testing and validation of prprietary code. By definition, the Open Source development model is not fit to subdue to any form of strict processes which contradicts the very notion of "Open Source Quality Assurance".
I would recommend starting with "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[1] by Eric Reymond which is an essay that tries to explain why and how Open Source quality appears to be higher then regular proprietary code. I'd also recommend looking at an article[2] published in the 90s in "Communications of the ACM" where various implementations of the Unix utilities were tested against reliabilty when fed with random input, it's shown that the GNU tools were more reliable than the proprietary Unix implementations.
I believe it will be great if you can hook up with the QA departments at Red Hat and Novell to get an idea about how they actually apply a QA process to Open Source projects.
Good luck!
--
[1] Available online
[2] http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/miller90empirical.html is a similar work
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