Exciting Times

The KDE Quality Team was covered on Slashdot today. Maybe working in a test org makes me biased, but this is a great concept for the open source world, and one of the missing links for OSS IMO. Some of the tasks, like writing documentation, may fall out of the typical QA realm, but should work really well as a way to get more non-technical people to feel they too can participate in the various projects. It’s something I’ve experienced with the VS PowerToys. There are a lot more members of each project than there are members willing or able to code a tremendous amount that could probably be really helpful if they did things as simple as verifying that bugs are indeed fixed for the other members before a release is posted. Eventually you could see an OSS quality team writing unit tests or other basic verifications that could also be checked into each project.

I’ve often thought about something simple like opening up our test plans for the community so people could say “Yeah, that should cover how I work” or “No, you’re totally missing these extreme cases I run into every day”. It’s exciting to see “the competition” push us at Microsoft further down the road towards being more open about our work and involving the community to help shape our own projects for the better.