Re: PHP QA processes

Hi, On 6 Feb 2004, at 12:43, Roger Keays wrote:

Hi All, Myself and a group of developers are forming a QA team for the open source Xaraya project (http://www.xaraya.com), and I am wondering if you might find a spare moment to share your experiences with us by answering a few short questions.

Good luck ;) See http://qa.php.net/ for starters. Disclaimer: This is no posting on behalf of the QA group, but more a personal statement.

1. What are the main activities of your QA group?

We'd like to know that, too, because apparently they are not working on PHP's QA ;) No seriously, what usually is done is to test new releases or release candidates for known bugs? We keep track of fixed bugs with writing test cases for your automated test suite. At the moment, there is no fixed group, but more a bunch of individuals checking for most of the things. I.e. if somebody fixes a bug, he submits a testcase for it, to ensure it doesn't happen again. Then we have a handful of people who look after the windows build, for the unix developers tend to forget certain things regularly. What else? We (Jani) look(s) at the bug database and evaluates the reports to see if they are actual bugs or bogus. This helps developers to look for real bugs.

2. How do they work with the development team?

Again, they are not distinct. Some developers just do QA work additionally.

3. What is your definition of 'Quality'?

Passing as much as possible test cases of our automated testing suite.

4. How do you measure quality?

Our testing suite spits out statistics.

5. What is the most effective way to produce high quality software?

What is the holy grail you ask? There are a lot of theories, papers and books out there. Everything around eXtreme Programming sounds promising to me.

6. What is the least effective way to produce high quality software?

Let a shizophrenian (sp?) dude code all code in one long spaghetti-code file? I don't know. There are a zillion ways.

7. Does you QA group follow any open or non-open (e.g. company-specific) standards?

Not really, not officially.

8. Do you believe software can be defect free?

Nope.