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Seems like we need more Open Source QA people to confirm bugs or gather missing info. Developers aren't necessarily capable of (for lack of want) or good at doi

Seems like we need more Open Source QA people to confirm bugs or gather missing info. Developers aren't necessarily capable of (for lack of want) or good at doing that.

IgorPartola 14y ago
We need more QA people period. I have never met a developer that wanted to do QA work. The closest a developer will come to doing QA is automated testing. There is a reason for this. Doing QA is tedious and involves a lot of work which may not be particularly stimulating. OSS developers that produce quality software are fairly rare. OSS QA's are orders of magnitude harder to find.
- danielweber 14y ago
  It's usually very hard to QA one's own work. You are trying to find out why you suck which is very weird. (I am currently testing the ever-living daylights out of a piece of open-source software I'm working on, but I inherited it from someone else, which I'm sure makes me more willing to find out how it handles.) I have no problem QA'ing other people's work. And, I have no problem when someone else finds bugs in my code. Maybe we need a QA-swap-meet.
- armored_mammal 14y ago
  The reason we don't do much of it is that it's not viewed as a productive expenditure of dev time by management.
- philk10 14y ago
  Depends on your attitude and approach... I'm a dev that turned into a tester as I loved doing it and find it a great challenge. I'm currently helping test Wikipedia, enjoying it, so might go looking for other projects to help out
CJefferson 14y ago
I did quite a lot of QA for a large open source project (I don't want to pick on them, so I aren't going to name them). At first it is great fun, reducing testcases, talking to users, etc. However, the problem is that you still aren't a developer, and can't actually fix bugs. Also, because this is open source (and you are just a QA person), you can't direct what bugs you think need fixing most importantly. Those bugs lie open for months, making you (the QA person) look bad, but you obviously can't do anything about it yourself. When you complain, the obvious suggestion is "move into development, then you can fix bugs yourself". Of course, when you do that, you don't have time for QA any more. Therefore, good QA people usually either leave, or turn into developers. Do I have a suggested fix for this? Not really. We can't really demand that developers donating their time do what QA people donating their time tell them to do.

Seems like we need more Open Source QA people to confirm bugs or gather missing info. Developers aren't necessarily capable of (for lack of want) or good at doing that.

IgorPartola 14y ago

We need more QA people period. I have never met a developer that wanted to do QA work. The closest a developer will come to doing QA is automated testing. There is a reason for this. Doing QA is tedious and involves a lot of work which may not be particularly stimulating. OSS developers that produce quality software are fairly rare. OSS QA's are orders of magnitude harder to find.

danielweber 14y ago
It's usually very hard to QA one's own work. You are trying to find out why you suck which is very weird. (I am currently testing the ever-living daylights out of a piece of open-source software I'm working on, but I inherited it from someone else, which I'm sure makes me more willing to find out how it handles.) I have no problem QA'ing other people's work. And, I have no problem when someone else finds bugs in my code. Maybe we need a QA-swap-meet.
armored_mammal 14y ago
The reason we don't do much of it is that it's not viewed as a productive expenditure of dev time by management.
philk10 14y ago
Depends on your attitude and approach... I'm a dev that turned into a tester as I loved doing it and find it a great challenge. I'm currently helping test Wikipedia, enjoying it, so might go looking for other projects to help out

CJefferson 14y ago

I did quite a lot of QA for a large open source project (I don't want to pick on them, so I aren't going to name them). At first it is great fun, reducing testcases, talking to users, etc. However, the problem is that you still aren't a developer, and can't actually fix bugs. Also, because this is open source (and you are just a QA person), you can't direct what bugs you think need fixing most importantly. Those bugs lie open for months, making you (the QA person) look bad, but you obviously can't do anything about it yourself. When you complain, the obvious suggestion is "move into development, then you can fix bugs yourself". Of course, when you do that, you don't have time for QA any more. Therefore, good QA people usually either leave, or turn into developers. Do I have a suggested fix for this? Not really. We can't really demand that developers donating their time do what QA people donating their time tell them to do.