Tuesday May 29, 2007

Perspective on open source product testing I thought of having some key ideas on open source product testing.

In my view the following goals and strategies in the open source products testing can help in improving the quality and maintaining the testing pace.

1. Set reasonable Quality (see the decided quality metrics) and excellent user-experience: This is important as most of the open source projects to come up early in the users hand ahead rather than waiting for long product release time. Also these products need to focus on good user experience so that users can quickly adopt to the product.
Think about stack rather than a piece of the product.

2. Evangelize the product (more adoption): Try to envangelize the product as much as possible with various methods - well working samples, clear use case related examples (these are keys) in addition to blogs, feeds, webcasts, free tutorials, participating in universities etc.  Again getting more user base is the key. Increase the testers and initial learners.

3. Full OpenSource (tools) and contribute the world: Try to use well known open source tools so that many users known of them and also easy to participate and contribute in the testing effort.
 

4. Re-use the testers/tests/infrastructure: Re-use save time and energy. So don't need to start from scratch unless there is no solution out-there. Improve on the existing test base and simplify.

5. Pro-active approach rather than re-active: It is important to keep in deal with the criticism and comments where everyone would like show their own way and known products. So be patient and response pro-actively rather than re-acting.

6. Automate tests in maximum: This is important to save lot of time to deal with changes happening with the product stack in the open source.

7. Measure the quality - define quality metrics :  Unless we measure what we are doing, we can't really know where we are. In this angle, it is better to decide some level of metrics such as code coverage, bugs list etc.

8. Provide feedback as frequently as possible (say weekly or even daily) on the product quality to the community. This way people see the dynamism or vibration in the product community.

Do you have some more key or  simple things to do? Please share.

Sharing is good for everyone!


Posted by Jagadesh Babu Munta ( May 29 2007, 12:52:59 PM PDT ) Permalink