Alfred: > Just one thing need to be made clear. Could we trust the testing results > from other companies or communities? I think GNOME has the similar > situation with Firefox/Thunderbird. Solaris shares most code with Linux > distros but there are still some differences.
Considering that each company has limited test resources, and that some aspects of QA testing are very labor intensive (such as accessibility testing), I would think that today each company is probably only testing a small percentage of the total overall functionality. If companies were working more closely together, it might be possible to ensure that the work is divided up so that a larger overall percentage of GNOME gets tested for each release. Some testing, even if on a different operating system, is better than no testing. Also, some aspects of testing could be shared even if every company did their own separate testing. For example, the work to generate (and keep up-to-date) effective test specifications could be something that companies could better share. This way testing across different organizations would be more consistent and each organization wouldn't be re-inventing the same wheels. > If a Linux distro releases a test report with GO, do we still need to > do the test again on Solaris? It would probably make sense to address this on a case-by-case basis. Some applications are more critical (or more likely to have distro specific issues) than others. Each distro probably would want to do their own testing to make sure that mission critical programs are working properly. Other programs (for example the GNOME calculator or hex editor) might be of lower priority, and testing such programs could perhaps be rotated so a different distro would test the application for each GNOME release. I am just trying to suggest that there are likely opportunities for different organizations involved with GNOME to share QA testing work, and making QA testing efforts more effective overall for GNOME. Obviously working out the details would require some discussion and coordination across the different organizations to make any sort of program workable. At the moment, I do not think the GNOME community has any real infrastructure for sharing this sort of work, so the first step would probably be to start a discussion with the GNOME community and see if other companies have an interest in working together in this way. Brian
