Community-driven software QA. My quest for inspiration.

Scene-setter for blogs to come.

I haven’t mentioned since blog #1 that I’m the Test Lead at Symbian. Nine months into the job, it’s sunk in that what it must mainly be about is enabling. Enabling the Symbian community to forge the testing capability it needs.

Probably I’ve been slow to digest this insight because of my prior CV. Until I started this job, for going on 5 years I’d led the team that maintained the Developer Build & Test System (DABS) in Symbian’s corporate precursor, Symbian Software Ltd (call it SSL). DABS was the nightly build and test system shared by the 30 or so software development teams that made up the software engineering force in SSL. In SSL, naturally, it went without saying that we test our software to shippable quality, all by ourselves before anybody else gets a look at it. And DABS bore most of that testing effort.

Now, I can see that I my professional mindset needs reset. So I’ve been looking at Linux distros to see what I – and Symbian – can learn about successful test strategies for a non-profit provider of an open-source personal computing platform; foremost, to learn how these projects are able to harness community resources for their testing operations and the ways in which they do it.

I looked to Linux distributions because they are only sustained examples of successful non-profit providers of open-source personal computing platforms and are exemplary of community powered software production at its most accomplished and ambitious. Symbian by its raison d’être faces the same challenges that face a Linux distro. (But not only the same challenges; a qualification that might be crucial).

I use “non-profit” there in a relaxed sense. I mean that the platform is provided at no charge. All of the most popular Linux distros now – say the distrowatch top 5 – have some sort of corporate backing that turns a profit from professional services and support for the free platform, or by selling and supporting a value-added down-stream spin. Symbian has profit-motivated corporate backing too – our funding members – but our platform is provided at no charge, and nothing is success for Symbian but community-built success.

I’ve studied the web-presenses of leading Linux distros – Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, Ubuntu (impartially alphabetical order here). I’ve peered around the online resources and activities that lie behind. I’ve made some contacts who are in roles like mine, and been welcomed to question what they do, and how and why. (Debian, I must hasten to emphasise, has no corporate stakeholders: it is a pure community project).

I’ve taken away a rich load of perceptions and learning points about community-driven software testing and QA for which I want to get the attention of Symbian, its community and ecosystem. I’ll be blogging on this theme. Not all of my perceptions are of beckoning opportunities for Symbian to catch up. Some of them are of daunting impediments for Symbian catching up.

I’ve also taken away a sense of obligation to reciprocate the openess of the projects I’ve researched. I’m thinking: In the light of everything I’ve learned, what do I know about testing and QA that could be useful to these and other open-source projects? I’ll blog on that theme too.