I think it is a great idea, crowdsourcing qa to the user community. However I think one thing that is lacking (or maybe just not emphasized) are the the benefits to the users. Any issues they find will become critical priority (i would assume) and fixed before the release (if within reason). This has the potential to offset a lot of risk of people upgrading.
Andrea Aime wrote: > Hi all (devs and users lurking alike), > I'm writing this mail to see if we can, as a community, improve > the level of testing each GeoServer release gets before > being released. > > GeoServer QA improve a lot since two years ago, we now have > thousands of tests running during the builds, continuous > build servers checking each commit, work is underway to > run this checks on other OS/JVM, we run quite a number > of OGC CITE test suites before each release. > > Despite our best efforts some obvious bugs slip in. > What we need is some interactive testing, real world, > against existing applications, made by human beings. > People trying to configure new layers, test the > release against their production setup, check various > client applications do work. > > We have quite a large user community out there (900+ > subcscribers on the users ml last time I checked), if > only a few of them stepped in to become testers it could > make a large difference. Maybe someone is interested in keeping > GS working fine with uDig, or with QGis, or just check their > in house application works as expected. Someone else might > be interested in something more formalized, like manual test > scripts to be executed against a release candidate, but imho > it would be better if people would self organise and find > some kind of testing they have an interest into running. > > If some users are interested in doing this we could have > a "pens up" period of maybe 2-3 days before a release in > which those adventurers test nightlies and report regressions > (to be fixed) and new bugs (to be evaluated by severity). > > Developers, what do you think? > Users, I know quite some of you are lurking on this mailing > list to "check the pulse" of the development and see what's > boiling in the pot. This could be an occasion to step up > your involvement and work for a better GeoServer. > > Comments? > > Cheers > Andrea > > -- Justin Deoliveira OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org Enterprise support for open source geospatial. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Geoserver-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geoserver-devel
