Ideas at Symbian

Did you know Symbian runs a “new ideas” website? -  http://ideas.symbian.org. This is partly a blurb for it.

Anybody – not just Symbians – can register on the site and become a contributor of ideas, and/or a participant in the discussion of other people’s ideas. And you can vote for or against any of the ideas.

Ideas that attract sufficient support will enter a graduation process leading to expert review and, if expert approval is forthcoming, Symbian will run with the idea.

Even if you haven’t the time or inclination to participate on the site, you can browse it without registering and get an eyeful of the thinking that is going on about how Symbian can innovate, improve and grow on all fronts.

This is also a blurb for an idea that I have just floated on the site.  My idea is:

“A Build & Test results portal at developer.symbian.org”

And my pitch is:

“I propose that a new tab should be added to the Developer website menubar with a title like “Build & Test Results”, giving access to a menu like:

- Platform builds
- Package builds
- Platform tests
- Package tests
- Binary Compatibility tests

and that these links will lead to pages on which Symbian publishes “piping hot” the results of the relevant build and test operations.

The proposed new tab will provide a front door to the latest information of interest to all concerned with build & test progress and quality, and its history. It will showcase our continuous activity at the coalface – a key vitality demonstrator for open source projects. As we bring up the necessary capabilities it can be extended to embrace metrics and trend analysis.

Implementing this idea will call for work by the Build & Integration and Test teams to make results accessible for web publication, but this has already started. Those efforts should be joined up with a commitment that the rolling build & test results will have a prominent, unified entrance from developer.symbian.org.”

If you concur with that – or indeed if you oppose it – you can sign up to http://ideas.symbian.org in a jiffy and cast your vote.