Author: Olivier Berger

I’ve noticed two interesting talks made at the FOSDEM recently about QA on the Debian project (well, second one, not especially focused on Debian, but Martin speaks from experience with the Debian project of course), whose slides, I think, are really worth reading :

• Nobody expects the Finnish Inquisition, or: confessions of a Debian package torturer, by Lars Wirzenius,
• and Quality Issues in Free Software Projects, by Martin Michlmayr (University of Cambridge, UK)

First one is probably more humoristic, although more technical 😉

In any case, there is surely room for much improvement on systematic Quality Assurance in Libre projects.

In his presentation “Measuring developer activity. Motivation and some approaches“, our collegue Juan José Amor from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos introduced an attempt to use some new tools to monitor Libre (or not) developper’s activity.

The goal is to be able to establish a good calibration of metrics allowing estimation of developpers activity and productivity. Indeed, developper’s activity counted only in numbers of commits made in CVS, or of lines written in these files committed, may not reflect reality. Sometimes, a commit of one single line may have necessited hours of debug…

I think that this approach is indeed interesting. I hope it can be pursued without too many problems with the privacy of individual developers.

Maybe some new tools like beagle, for instance may be helpful in observing developper’s activity… let’s see what will come out of this research. Maybe I’ll volunteer too for testing them, and estimating what kind of productivity I can measure on myself.