[Gfoss] Fwd: [Qgis-user] Crowdfunding Project: Automated tests for QGIS

[Paolo Cavallini]

Salve.
Una interessante ed utile iniziativa per rendere piu' stabile e robusto QGIS.
Se verranno raggiunti ~4.200 €, verranno creati una serie di test automatici che
permetteranno di verificare l'esistenz adi malfunzionamenti prima ancora che questi
raggiungano gli utenti.
Dettagli qui di seguito.
Saluti.


-------- Messaggio Inoltrato --------
Oggetto: 	[Qgis-user] Crowdfunding Project: Automated tests for QGIS
Data: 	Fri, 10 Oct 2014 13:58:18 +0200
Mittente: 	Matthias Kuhn <matthias.kuhn at gmx.ch>
A: 	qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org



Dear QGIS users,

I started a crowd-funding campaign for automated unit tests in QGIS. Please consider
to help funding this project in order to improve the software and code quality in the
long run. More details can be found on the project page and in the text below.

http://blog.vitu.ch/10102014-1046/crowdfunding-initiative-automated-testing

I plan to improve the quality of QGIS sustainably by introducing the automatic
execution of test procedures which will inform responsible developers automatically
in case of failure. Your support for this project is highly welcome and you can
contribute to make QGIS more stable in the long run. To implement the necessary
changes as well as repairing currently broken tests a minimal amount of CHF 5000.-
will be required. The following paragraphs will describe the project in more detail.Â

----------

In the last years, QGIS matured from a hobby project to a serious alternative with a
broad scope of possibilities and a great potential.

With the constant addition of new features new possibilities have been created and
still are created. Every new feature means changes to the source code of the software
and is a potential source of errors.

There are possibilities to automatically detect errors. This is done by executing a
series of operations with known result. If a operation does not return the desired
(known) result something went wrong and it needs to be evaulated why.

QGIS has currently over 100 different tests. However, these are not run regularly and
nobody realizes when tests fail. This led to the situation, that at the moment
approximately 2/3 of the tests do not report success and nobody knows why and since when.

I intend to take the following measures to ensure that in the future tests no longer
can silently fail:

* tests will be run on all source code changes in master (main development branch)

* tests will be run on all pull requests (changes being evaluated for integration in
master)

* if tests fail the responsible developers will be notified by mail

* with symbols, the current state of the tests will be indicated

With this system it is possible to react instantaneously when tests fail and to
revert the responsible changes or to not even integrate these.

To make sure that this system works and is accepted, it is important to start with a
working suite of tests. How much time it takes to fix all tests is difficult to say.
The plan is therefore to fix as many tests with the available funds and to disable
the rest of the tests in the first time. Therefore additional funds that are provided
on top of the required minimum CHF 5000.- will be very welcome for additional working
tests.

It would be great if this crowd-funding effort could help to get this project to fly.

Kind regards,

Matthias Kuhn