Quality Assurance and Automated Testing in Open Source Software

This is planned to be the first one of a series of articles about how Quality Assurance is done in various Open Source projects with a focus on Automated Testing.

Projects

I'll try to review several kinds of software. I'll start with Perl 5, CPAN, Parrot and Perl 6 as I am more familiar with these projects but I'll try to do all kinds of other software.

Among the planned projects are PostgresSQL, Apache, Mozilla, Subversion but I would also like to check out some technologies such as XORP, the Open Source Router and the Vyatta Router / Firewall based on it. Other suggestions are welcome too. Contact me!

The audience

The audience is two fold. On one hand I would like to get more people involved in testing and development of Open Source Software, on the other hand these case studies can be used by QA managers of commercial entities developing closed source applications to learn how testing is done in the Open Source world.

Content

While the focus of these articles is the testing phase it is many times easier to understand how it works if we see the whole development process of the application. Especially as in most of the cases testing is integrated in the development process of the applications and is done during development time.

So the issues I'll try to look at are:

Who are the developers?
Who has the right to commit to the version control system?
Which version control system are they using?
Who makes the decisions in the project?
What bug-tracking system do they use?
What versions of the software are supported?
Is there a test suit for automated tests?
Are they running smoke test?
Where are the test reports?
How easy is it to setup smoke testing?
Do they have centralized management of the testing effort or is it distributed?

Articles

Published on 2007-07-07 by Gabor Szabo

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