Engaging Open Source Community in Quality Assurance
I am extremely excited to share that I have been playing the developer advocate role at AnitaB.org Open Source since a few months now. It started off with lurking on the community for a while and then some interest in developer advocacy. Well, as part of developer advocacy, one of our core responsibilities is outreach in terms of blogs, events to involve more individuals in open source, etc. One of the recent events that we hosted was about Engaging the Open source community in QA. It would be my pleasure to take you through the session and share my learnings.
We were especially delighted to get Preethi Thomas as our speaker for the event. Preethi is a highly motivated software development leader currently working as a manager at Red Hat, with experience in Engineering and Project Management, Quality Assurance and Software Development. She is also exceedingly passionate about diversity and inclusion.
The session started off with Preethi highlighting the importance of quality in software. She explained how the cost of quality rises over a period of time and how it becomes increasingly tough to fix defects later when the software has matured. Hence, quality is an investment that pays off.
“Quality is free. It’s not a gift, but it’s free. The ‘unquality’ things are what cost money. The cost of quality is the expense of doing things wrong.”
— Phil Crosby
With respect to contributing to the open source community, contributors usually fall into different roles as mentioned in the onion model. Contributors could starts off as users, then bug reporters, and the inner layers could be developers and the core team. Since a lot of folks in communities are from diverse backgrounds, different places, and varying time commitments, contributing often becomes challenging and so does ensuring the quality. To tackle some of these issues, the speaker shared with us examples of a few open source projects and how they involve contributors in the QE (quality engineering) process.
A few of the Buildah, Podman and Skopeo projects sponsored by Red Hat form a new generation of container management tools. These are all open source projects and contribution to QE for these projects is encouraged by means of bug reporting, bug verification, writing tests, automating, etc. Next, she spoke about Fedora Test Days. Test days are usually focussed on testing specific components in an upcoming Fedora release. Everybody is welcome to join the Test Days and participate in testing the software or features in question. If you are working on a particular feature on Fedora, you can also organize your own test day. In the same vein, Mozilla hosts the Bug Day. Each Bug Day has a topic and there are separate days for bug triaging and for bug verification. In triaging, they go through newly reported bugs, and in verification they try to make sure that “fixed” bugs are really fixed.
From the perspective of contributing to software that I use, bug days can be a great first step. It’s also a wonderful way for open source communities to onboard contributors and maintain quality.
If you have an ever increasing interest and are as passionate about contributing to and being part of open source, watch this space for more upcoming events hosted by AnitaB.org.
