O'Reilly Open Source Convention - August 1-5, 2005

Session
Participatory Testing
Shao Fang, Director of Productization and Testing, SpikeSource, Inc.
Glen Martin, Director of Product Management, SpikeSource, Inc.

Track: Products & Services
Date: Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005
Time: 4:30pm - 5:15pm

Open source methodologies have been highly successful for the development phase of the software life cycle, creating a commons of great software that developers can leverage.
A challenge that remains for enterprise open source adoption is systems testing. Existing open source testing methodologies are necessary and useful, but they do not take full advantage of that "architecture of participation" which makes open source development so powerful.
Collaboration has not been fully applied to testing phase of the software life cycle.
Successful collaboration depends on the existence of media of collaboration - in essence, tools. The success of open source development was enabled by the existence of great tools like cvs and bugzilla. These tools are developed to the needs of collaboration in development activity.
Testing activity is very different from development activity.
The differences mean that to fully realize the benefits of collaboration, we need new collaboration tools that focus on testing activities.
This session explores potential collaborations in testing, discussing benefits to software quality and release processes, and some possible tools to assist in these collaborations. Included is discussion of common payload definitions, reporting interfaces, and bi-directional federation of test results. We'll demonstrate some of these tools, which are under development as free services made available at spikesource.com.