My Blogs Sandeep Konchady's Weblog

Today is a exciting day for us in the Java SE organization.  We completed open sourcing of JDK as promised - OpenJDK. What is even more exciting for me is the fact that we are not only open in opening up our source, but we are transparent in what we do, how we do it and what it looks like. What is am referring to is the OpenJDK Quality portal. Have you seen the "Metrics" section. We are not shy to say that we have bugs in our code, but we encourage the community to participate, find more bugs and perhaps even suggest a fix.

To the best of my knowledge (correct me if I am wrong), most open source projects consists of passionate people who believe in the idea and want to develop something out of this world. Quality to a certain extent is ingrained in the experience of the developer(s) and is implicit. This works fine as long as we have a few passionate experienced folks working on a relatively small project. Given that Sun is now the largest contributor of source to the open source community and the shear size of OpenJDK, taking quality for granted or just making it a responsibility of only the developer(s) is not good enough. This is not to critique the developer(s), but the community has a bigger responsibility. That is where the OpenJDK Quality community comes into the picture. How cool is it to actually be a performance engineer who suggests how to make OpenJDK JVM faster on your choice of platform or file a bug on how some Swing widget does not look or feel like a native UI. If you ever wanted to gain experience on how to be a quality, or performance engineer, here is your chance.

You may as "What can I do with OpenJDK as a quality engineer" or "How do I get started" testing OpenJDK, The answer is simple follow a few simple steps and you are one of us.

1. Download OpenJDK however is convenient to you and start with building it. My recommendation would be for you to start small. Try using NetBeans and build just javac or HotSpot or which ever component you feel passionate about. For now email your issues against building of OpenJDK or any component to appropriate email aliases which are listed in their respective pages.
   
2. Email your suggestions and ideas on how to improve the quality of OpenJDK to OpenJDK Quality Discussion alias.
3. If you've already developed a test case for a specific OpenJDK component or a complete suite please make it a part of OpenJDK community. You can send in your questions and concerns to the alias listed above.

Finally to answer some of the frequently asked questions, please refer to OpenJDK Quality Portal FAQ. We are in the process of looking at what harness works best for OpenJDK quality community to use for functional testing, perhaps open up a few of our functional tests to bootstrap the community, make space for OpenJDK quality enthusiasts to contribute tests to the community, and how to file a bug. In the coming months you will see and hear a lot more about this. Finally if you are interested in any aspect of OpenJDK, then you are part of the community. Feel free to be a part of this community in any way shape of form an if you are reading this, you probably have the OpenJDK virus in you already.