Hi all,
In the past few weeks I've attended a *bunch* of talks on open source communities, testing, and so on, and at the same time have noted the growth of the Inkscape community over the past few months, most especially evident from the growth of list traffic with the 0.42 release.
At the same time, I've noticed that the project has been simultaneously gaining some better testing approaches while it has faced some QA challenges, most tangibly evidenced by the need for a 0.42.1 release to correct some errors due (it appears) to insufficient package testing.
About a year ago, we budded off the inkscape-users community, which has proven to be quite effective. The list surpasses inkscape-devel in membership, and has helped foster our user community to get involved in doing things like setting up the deviant-art sites, help with the about screen contest, spread PR, conduct testing, and assist other users.
Anyway, yesterday I heard a talk about how the Mozilla project similarly divides into sub-communities like we've done with -devel and -user, and have seen similar benefits (the NYT article organized by the Mozilla marketing community being an excellent case in point). I was particularly interested to learn that one of their most vibrant groups is their testing community, which organizes its focus specifically around making the browser better, collecting useful information from users, and ensuring there is sufficient test coverage of areas under development.
I think that given the strength of interest in the Inkscape 0.42 release, and the need for better testing that it's shown, that right now would be an opportune moment to form an "inkscape-tester" community.
The project definitely could benefit strongly from such a community. The purpose of this group could include:
* Package testing. As mentioned above, this was a challenge in the 0.42 release, and we need organized help here.
* Usability analysis. On the list recently has been a number of discussions regarding usability and the need for increased critique/analysis. Doing this within a community distinct from the development group may help focus it, and reduce the distraction of the debate that it generates.
* Automated testing. Several people have been working on establishing automated ways of testing (including nightly builds and packages), so this community would give these efforts a home.
* Platform compatibility. Inkscape is being used on an increasing diversity of operating systems and hardware. It's difficult to filter through the development and usage discussions to identify how to make it work on a certain platform. inkscape-testers would provide such a forum and a way to organize the collection and distribution of this information.
In general, the inkscape-tester group would stay at a higher level then core coding, focusing more on finding and analyzing problems, and helping to show Inkscape will work well for all users.
I've also thought a bit about some other communities that may be worth forming, such as a documentation community and perhaps a marketing community. Mozilla has both of these communities and finds them successful. There definitely is a need to help the various people working on documentation to become better organized and to have their efforts more recognized. If someone would be interested in organizing a documentation community, I think we have enough interest and participation to make it viable.
For a marketing community, I don't think the time is quite right; our marketing efforts are already meeting and exceeding our expectations, and the amount of resources needed is limited and generally only comes into play for the short period around a release.
Of the three, I feel the inkscape-tester community would be the most valuable to form right now, and would give us the most bang for the buck. I'm willing to put effort into getting it organized and started. Are there people who'd like to see this formed and/or participate in it?
Bryce
Bryce Harrington wrote:
Of the three, I feel the inkscape-tester community would be the most valuable to form right now, and would give us the most bang for the buck. I'm willing to put effort into getting it organized and started. Are there people who'd like to see this formed and/or participate in it?
Well, I don't remember who had the quote, but I'll paraphrase: "Never start a mailing list unless you have to." I don't think that the amount of traffic caused by testing e-mails has overwhelmed -devel yet... so, I would say that it might a bit premature yet.
--Ted
On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 02:34:01PM -0700, Ted Gould wrote:
Bryce Harrington wrote:
Of the three, I feel the inkscape-tester community would be the most valuable to form right now, and would give us the most bang for the buck. I'm willing to put effort into getting it organized and started. Are there people who'd like to see this formed and/or participate in it?
Well, I don't remember who had the quote, but I'll paraphrase: "Never start a mailing list unless you have to." I don't think that the amount
*Grin* I think that was me quoting jmz. ;-)
of traffic caused by testing e-mails has overwhelmed -devel yet... so, I would say that it might a bit premature yet.
I would argue the opposite. I think we've definitely achieved enough sustained discussion of QA topics like usability, testing, and so forth, that a separate mailing list would be viable.
However, the reason for the proposal is not really to migrate traffic off the main list so much as to increase the focus we can give to testing of inkscape.
Bryce
On 8/4/05, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...69...> wrote:
Of the three, I feel the inkscape-tester community would be the most valuable to form right now, and would give us the most bang for the buck. I'm willing to put effort into getting it organized and started. Are there people who'd like to see this formed and/or participate in it?
I really don't think it's necessary. The -user works well because it allows users to explain Inkscape tricks to each other, which not all devs are interested in. But even that list has its downside, as quite often I see there complaints and bug reports that the devs really should see. The same will be even more true for -testing. Simply put, all devs must care about testing by definition, so I see no reason for a person to be on one list and not the other, and therefore I see no reason for a separate list at all.
Especially with this broad definition:
sustained discussion of QA topics like usability, testing, and so forth,
Usability is definitely a topic for ALL devs (and users) to discuss.
On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 07:24:24PM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
On 8/4/05, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...69...> wrote:
Of the three, I feel the inkscape-tester community would be the most valuable to form right now, and would give us the most bang for the buck. I'm willing to put effort into getting it organized and started. Are there people who'd like to see this formed and/or participate in it?
I really don't think it's necessary. The -user works well because it allows users to explain Inkscape tricks to each other, which not all devs are interested in. But even that list has its downside, as quite often I see there complaints and bug reports that the devs really should see. The same will be even more true for -testing. Simply put, all devs must care about testing by definition, so I see no reason for a person to be on one list and not the other, and therefore I see no reason for a separate list at all.
No, you are making some broad assertions, but you are overlooking some key points.
First, not all developers care about testing. In fact, on multiple ocassions I have seen them actively discourage it (sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not.)
* Several people (including myself) have attempted to do performance analysis of Inkscape. Typically this seems to really irritate developers; I recall being chastised that I was wasting my time and should be doing coding on the algorithms or something instead. In an inkscape-tester group such work could be conducted without directly irritating developers.
* Another good example was your reaction to my posting of warnings found by the test harness. You remarked, "I'm quite tired of seeing these warnings and complaints." As I'd only posted a couple of reports, I found this surprising and rather discouraging. Since then I've held off on posting updates, and think that an inkscape-tester list would be a more inviting place to post them.
* A more recent example was when I expressed interest in testing cairo in Inkscape. This was quite actively discouraged, because developers didn't want to think at all about cairo issues until cairo was sufficiently perfect that they could plug it in. Ironically, the cairo developers themselves don't want to think about those issues until it is plugged into an application. A group dedicated to testing would be able to conduct this analysis without getting so directly dismissed by developers.
Second, you say that "see no reason for someone to be on one list but not the other". This is clearly a poor assumption:
* Some people are quite willing to help with testing but won't be interested in regular developer discussion. Even if all developers were interested in testing, not all testers will be interested in development!
* As shown above, some Inkscape developers do not view testing as important. Some developers like you and me do want to have visibility into all aspects of quality control, but others simply want to focus on their particular features they're interested in. If their are quality problems with their code, they'd rather someone approach them directly, rather than having to watch all of the general testing discussion.
* Not all traffic on a testing list would be bug reports. Indeed, that's what we have the bug tracker for. Much discussion would go into writing testing scripts, or organizing who should test what features, or questions about inkscape usage that would simply further irritate developers to have to see.
Third, you appear to consider the only reason to establish a new list is to segregate traffic, as if the only purpose of separate lists is as bins for email. A mailing list is more than just a collection of emails, it is a community, and as such will have certain sociological behaviors, mindsets, and patterns. Even if there was a 100% overlap between inkscape-devel and inkscape-tester, the identity that people would take into that group would be distinct.
People have different "behavioral modes" when in different kinds of group settings. When you and your friends go to a wedding, you will behave one way, when you go to work you'll behave another way, and when you are going out for beers you'll act a third way. It may be exactly the same people in each situation, but the group setting will establish a different kind of focus.
I believe the same would happen if we established an inkscape-tester group. A group identity with a focus on testing would emerge, and activities would organize themselves around testing, perhaps in ways much different from what could be attained if the same people attempted to work as a subsidiary of inkscape-devel.
Quality improvement has been a long objective of mine. When I got involved with Sodipodi, one of the first things I did was to set up processes for using the bug tracker to help increase the stability of the codebase. We brought these same processes over to Inkscape, and look at how much benefit they've brought. Before we started this process, crashes were commonplace, yet today they are very rare, and when they inevitably do occur, the process we have enables them to get quickly recorded and bubbled up to the top of the list for intense focus and typically rapid fix.
Inkscape is also extremely well known for its usability, and this is directly attributed to our open development processes, that helps users get directly involved in development. This was not accidental; this was one of the principle reasons for our fork in the first place. You yourself were one of the earliest beneficiaries of this policy, as it resulted in enabling you to get very involved in improving the keyboard shortcuts.
I've also put a lot of thought into systematizing our release process over many releases, integrating a lot of people's ideas to help give us a system that matches to what we as a group are comfortable with, and that generally gives us much control over the quality of our releases.
I think there are still more areas where we can achieve great improvements in the quality of Inkscape. Performance, automated regression testing, organized usability analysis, experimental testing, interoperability checking, test/tool development, and more. Just as we needed to make some aggressive changes to the project to enable us to reach new levels of quality, so to do I think that forming a testing focused group will enable the project to achieve these other aims.
Anyway, it's too bad that the three responses so far have not been supportive to the idea. I feel very strongly that this change would benefit Inkscape, just as adopting a bug tracker helped stability, establishing open development processes helped usability, and establishing a release process helped installability. Am I the only person that thinks we could benefit from an organized testing community?
Bryce
Bryce Harrington wrote:
[...] Anyway, it's too bad that the three responses so far have not been supportive to the idea. I feel very strongly that this change would benefit Inkscape, just as adopting a bug tracker helped stability, establishing open development processes helped usability, and establishing a release process helped installability. Am I the only person that thinks we could benefit from an organized testing community?
It seems to me, and I've been around computers since 1970 and using Linux since 1996, that testing software independent of developers, programmers and coders is fundamental to the process. As Linux gets more mature we should see more of that. Each package should have, in my opinion, a set of testers using a wide variety of hardware and distros to find and point out problems.
Linux as a whole needs more structure to guide its progress if it is ever to be a player on the desktop, versus Apple and Microsoft. The whole thing right now reminds me of what was happening in the early '80s. Unix had a good chance of being a desktop player but for the unbelievable problems of getting everyone to pull in the same direction. Enough said about that.
Let's have a testing group with its mail list.
Frank
On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 17:38 -0700, frank gaude' wrote:
Bryce Harrington wrote:
[...] Anyway, it's too bad that the three responses so far have not been supportive to the idea. I feel very strongly that this change would benefit Inkscape, just as adopting a bug tracker helped stability, establishing open development processes helped usability, and establishing a release process helped installability. Am I the only person that thinks we could benefit from an organized testing community?
It seems to me, and I've been around computers since 1970 and using Linux since 1996, that testing software independent of developers, programmers and coders is fundamental to the process. As Linux gets more mature we should see more of that. Each package should have, in my opinion, a set of testers using a wide variety of hardware and distros to find and point out problems.
Linux as a whole needs more structure to guide its progress if it is ever to be a player on the desktop, versus Apple and Microsoft. The whole thing right now reminds me of what was happening in the early '80s. Unix had a good chance of being a desktop player but for the unbelievable problems of getting everyone to pull in the same direction. Enough said about that.
Let's have a testing group with its mail list.
While my initial reaction is to be conservative on the creation of more infrastructure, I think you have a great idea Bryce. Also, I think that it is no skin off the rest of the developers' collective backs for you to set this up and drive it.
Testing is very important, and even if this list is not that active, a focus around this subject will really help the project.
I think also that a testing list would help encourage people to transition from user, to tester, to developer...enabling this type of transition is so necessary in OSS.
Go for it!
Jon
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Quoting Jon Phillips <jon@...87...>:
Testing is very important, and even if this list is not that active, a focus around this subject will really help the project.
Yes, agreed. I think we would benefit from having an inkscape-testing list as a point of focus.
Realize, however, that simply having a point to focus on will not automatically give us focus. We'll need to think about some additional concrete steps to go with the creation of the list.
-mental
mental@...32... wrote:
Quoting Jon Phillips <jon@...87...>:
esting is very important, and even if this list is not that active, a focus around this subject will really help the project.
Yes, agreed. I think we would benefit from having an inkscape-testing list as a point of focus.
Realize, however, that simply having a point to focus on will not automatically give us focus. We'll need to think about some additional concrete steps to go with the creation of the list.
-mental
Okay, for a starter we need a tester for each distro that is popular, one for i386 and one for i686 machines.
frank
On Fri, Aug 05, 2005 at 01:22:25PM -0400, mental@...32... wrote:
Quoting Jon Phillips <jon@...87...>:
Testing is very important, and even if this list is not that active, a focus around this subject will really help the project.
Yes, agreed. I think we would benefit from having an inkscape-testing list as a point of focus.
Okay, I've gone ahead and created the list.
Realize, however, that simply having a point to focus on will not automatically give us focus. We'll need to think about some additional concrete steps to go with the creation of the list.
Agreed. I think this will be a long term effort to get organized, but I'm sure we can do it. I have some ideas, but do you have some suggestions in mind?
Bryce
On Fri, 2005-08-12 at 12:18 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Fri, Aug 05, 2005 at 01:22:25PM -0400, mental@...32... wrote:
Quoting Jon Phillips <jon@...87...>:
Testing is very important, and even if this list is not that active, a focus around this subject will really help the project.
Yes, agreed. I think we would benefit from having an inkscape-testing list as a point of focus.
Okay, I've gone ahead and created the list.
Realize, however, that simply having a point to focus on will not automatically give us focus. We'll need to think about some additional concrete steps to go with the creation of the list.
Agreed. I think this will be a long term effort to get organized, but I'm sure we can do it. I have some ideas, but do you have some suggestions in mind?
I think as long as the list just has the daily build report it is already a success. It could be an ambient test feed until there is more community involvement :)
Jon
On 8/4/05, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...69...> wrote:
First, not all developers care about testing. In fact, on multiple ocassions I have seen them actively discourage it (sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not.)
Hmm, even if this so, I don't think it's the behavior we should encourage.
- Several people (including myself) have attempted to do performance
analysis of Inkscape. Typically this seems to really irritate developers; I recall being chastised that I was wasting my time and should be doing coding on the algorithms or something instead.
I don't remember this, but in any case, it's not something I'd approve. I and I think most other devs are very interested in performance testing and profiling. I have always said so. In fact I do some simple tests myself from time to time and report if they discover notable changes.
- Another good example was your reaction to my posting of warnings found
by the test harness. You remarked, "I'm quite tired of seeing these warnings and complaints."
Sorry, you have entirely misread me. All I wanted to say is, "PLEASE someone finally fix these problems", not "please stop reporting them". I was tired of seeing them _in my compiles_, not on the list! In fact I was even GLAD that someone reported them and thus gave me the pretext to whine about these warnings, as I was too lazy to bring up the subject myself.
As I'd only posted a couple of reports, I found this surprising and rather discouraging. Since then I've held off on posting updates, and think that an inkscape-tester list would be a more inviting place to post them.
If you ever again find my comments weird or discouraging in any way, please don't hesitate to ask me directly. I may not always be able to express my intent entirely clearly.
- A more recent example was when I expressed interest in testing cairo
in Inkscape. This was quite actively discouraged,
Sorry, wrong again. We just agreed that it's premature to integrate it into Inkscape even as an option, at this point. But as for testing, I'm all for it. I would be VERY interested to see more sample renderings and render timings of Cairo.
- Some people are quite willing to help with testing but won't be interested in regular developer discussion.
It's very hard to make such a distinction, IMHO.
Even if all developers were interested in testing, not all testers will be interested in development!
They don't have to read it. They can just post their results and respond to questions, and skip the rest. The reason why this is best done on devel is that it's the only more or less guaranteed way to catch the attention of the specific developer who's responsible for this part of code, and to respond to his specific questions.
If their are quality problems with their code, they'd rather someone approach them directly, rather than having to watch all of the general testing discussion.
Testers often have no way of knowing whose particular problem is this. So they can't do better than to post to the list that ALL devs read.
- Not all traffic on a testing list would be bug reports. Indeed, that's what we have the bug tracker for. Much discussion would go into writing testing scripts
Which is where devs' help is important. Nobody can know better than me how to test my feature.
Even if there was a 100% overlap between inkscape-devel and inkscape-tester, the identity that people would take into that group would be distinct.
In practice this would most likely mean that most of posts will be cross-posted to both lists, as now many posts are cross-posted to devel and user.
A group identity with a focus on testing would emerge
I guess what may result from this is that testers will be discouraged by (perceived) lack of attention from devs. For a typical tester, the ultimate goal is not to participate in a community but to have some issue fixed, and for that, the best (and the only) way is to reach the right developer.
In short, I remain convinced that testing is an absolutely unseparable part of development, so I don't think a separate list (even with the same membership) is such a good idea. Even for the user/devel pair, there's a lot of crossposting and misplaced threads, though I think these twp lists will grow more separate with time. But with testing, I just don't see any reason for it to grow significantly separate from development, ever. (If it does, I don't think it bodes well for the quality of the project.)
On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 21:56 -0300, bulia byak wrote:
On 8/4/05, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...69...> wrote:
First, not all developers care about testing. In fact, on multiple ocassions I have seen them actively discourage it (sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not.)
Hmm, even if this so, I don't think it's the behavior we should encourage.
- Several people (including myself) have attempted to do performance
analysis of Inkscape. Typically this seems to really irritate developers; I recall being chastised that I was wasting my time and should be doing coding on the algorithms or something instead.
I don't remember this, but in any case, it's not something I'd approve. I and I think most other devs are very interested in performance testing and profiling. I have always said so. In fact I do some simple tests myself from time to time and report if they discover notable changes.
- Another good example was your reaction to my posting of warnings found
by the test harness. You remarked, "I'm quite tired of seeing these warnings and complaints."
Sorry, you have entirely misread me. All I wanted to say is, "PLEASE someone finally fix these problems", not "please stop reporting them". I was tired of seeing them _in my compiles_, not on the list! In fact I was even GLAD that someone reported them and thus gave me the pretext to whine about these warnings, as I was too lazy to bring up the subject myself.
As I'd only posted a couple of reports, I found this surprising and rather discouraging. Since then I've held off on posting updates, and think that an inkscape-tester list would be a more inviting place to post them.
If you ever again find my comments weird or discouraging in any way, please don't hesitate to ask me directly. I may not always be able to express my intent entirely clearly.
- A more recent example was when I expressed interest in testing cairo
in Inkscape. This was quite actively discouraged,
Sorry, wrong again. We just agreed that it's premature to integrate it into Inkscape even as an option, at this point. But as for testing, I'm all for it. I would be VERY interested to see more sample renderings and render timings of Cairo.
- Some people are quite willing to help with testing but won't be interested in regular developer discussion.
It's very hard to make such a distinction, IMHO.
Even if all developers were interested in testing, not all testers will be interested in development!
They don't have to read it. They can just post their results and respond to questions, and skip the rest. The reason why this is best done on devel is that it's the only more or less guaranteed way to catch the attention of the specific developer who's responsible for this part of code, and to respond to his specific questions.
If their are quality problems with their code, they'd rather someone approach them directly, rather than having to watch all of the general testing discussion.
Testers often have no way of knowing whose particular problem is this. So they can't do better than to post to the list that ALL devs read.
- Not all traffic on a testing list would be bug reports. Indeed, that's what we have the bug tracker for. Much discussion would go into writing testing scripts
Which is where devs' help is important. Nobody can know better than me how to test my feature.
Even if there was a 100% overlap between inkscape-devel and inkscape-tester, the identity that people would take into that group would be distinct.
In practice this would most likely mean that most of posts will be cross-posted to both lists, as now many posts are cross-posted to devel and user.
A group identity with a focus on testing would emerge
I guess what may result from this is that testers will be discouraged by (perceived) lack of attention from devs. For a typical tester, the ultimate goal is not to participate in a community but to have some issue fixed, and for that, the best (and the only) way is to reach the right developer.
In short, I remain convinced that testing is an absolutely unseparable part of development, so I don't think a separate list (even with the same membership) is such a good idea. Even for the user/devel pair, there's a lot of crossposting and misplaced threads, though I think these twp lists will grow more separate with time. But with testing, I just don't see any reason for it to grow significantly separate from development, ever. (If it does, I don't think it bodes well for the quality of the project.)
I don't think that the tester list would separate testing from development. Development will always have some level of testing and reporting. This testing list seems to be more focused on heavy testing, setting up test systems, feeds of daily tests on Inkscape, packaging issues, etc. If anything, the dev. list will serve as a hub to then send ppl. to the testing list.
We have to face that our project is growing and sometimes we need to subdivide tasks, etc...I think this sounds like a good idea.
Jon
See bottom-post:
Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 07:24:24PM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
On 8/4/05, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...69...> wrote:
Of the three, I feel the inkscape-tester community would be the most valuable to form right now, and would give us the most bang for the buck. I'm willing to put effort into getting it organized and started. Are there people who'd like to see this formed and/or participate in it?
I really don't think it's necessary. The -user works well because it allows users to explain Inkscape tricks to each other, which not all devs are interested in. But even that list has its downside, as quite often I see there complaints and bug reports that the devs really should see. The same will be even more true for -testing. Simply put, all devs must care about testing by definition, so I see no reason for a person to be on one list and not the other, and therefore I see no reason for a separate list at all.
No, you are making some broad assertions, but you are overlooking some key points.
First, not all developers care about testing. In fact, on multiple ocassions I have seen them actively discourage it (sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not.)
- Several people (including myself) have attempted to do performance
analysis of Inkscape. Typically this seems to really irritate developers; I recall being chastised that I was wasting my time and should be doing coding on the algorithms or something instead. In an inkscape-tester group such work could be conducted without directly irritating developers.
- Another good example was your reaction to my posting of warnings found
by the test harness. You remarked, "I'm quite tired of seeing these warnings and complaints." As I'd only posted a couple of reports, I found this surprising and rather discouraging. Since then I've held off on posting updates, and think that an inkscape-tester list would be a more inviting place to post them.
- A more recent example was when I expressed interest in testing cairo
in Inkscape. This was quite actively discouraged, because developers didn't want to think at all about cairo issues until cairo was sufficiently perfect that they could plug it in. Ironically, the cairo developers themselves don't want to think about those issues until it is plugged into an application. A group dedicated to testing would be able to conduct this analysis without getting so directly dismissed by developers.
Second, you say that "see no reason for someone to be on one list but not the other". This is clearly a poor assumption:
- Some people are quite willing to help with testing but won't be
interested in regular developer discussion. Even if all developers were interested in testing, not all testers will be interested in development!
- As shown above, some Inkscape developers do not view testing as
important. Some developers like you and me do want to have visibility into all aspects of quality control, but others simply want to focus on their particular features they're interested in. If their are quality problems with their code, they'd rather someone approach them directly, rather than having to watch all of the general testing discussion.
- Not all traffic on a testing list would be bug reports. Indeed,
that's what we have the bug tracker for. Much discussion would go into writing testing scripts, or organizing who should test what features, or questions about inkscape usage that would simply further irritate developers to have to see.
Third, you appear to consider the only reason to establish a new list is to segregate traffic, as if the only purpose of separate lists is as bins for email. A mailing list is more than just a collection of emails, it is a community, and as such will have certain sociological behaviors, mindsets, and patterns. Even if there was a 100% overlap between inkscape-devel and inkscape-tester, the identity that people would take into that group would be distinct.
People have different "behavioral modes" when in different kinds of group settings. When you and your friends go to a wedding, you will behave one way, when you go to work you'll behave another way, and when you are going out for beers you'll act a third way. It may be exactly the same people in each situation, but the group setting will establish a different kind of focus.
I believe the same would happen if we established an inkscape-tester group. A group identity with a focus on testing would emerge, and activities would organize themselves around testing, perhaps in ways much different from what could be attained if the same people attempted to work as a subsidiary of inkscape-devel.
Quality improvement has been a long objective of mine. When I got involved with Sodipodi, one of the first things I did was to set up processes for using the bug tracker to help increase the stability of the codebase. We brought these same processes over to Inkscape, and look at how much benefit they've brought. Before we started this process, crashes were commonplace, yet today they are very rare, and when they inevitably do occur, the process we have enables them to get quickly recorded and bubbled up to the top of the list for intense focus and typically rapid fix.
Inkscape is also extremely well known for its usability, and this is directly attributed to our open development processes, that helps users get directly involved in development. This was not accidental; this was one of the principle reasons for our fork in the first place. You yourself were one of the earliest beneficiaries of this policy, as it resulted in enabling you to get very involved in improving the keyboard shortcuts.
I've also put a lot of thought into systematizing our release process over many releases, integrating a lot of people's ideas to help give us a system that matches to what we as a group are comfortable with, and that generally gives us much control over the quality of our releases.
I think there are still more areas where we can achieve great improvements in the quality of Inkscape. Performance, automated regression testing, organized usability analysis, experimental testing, interoperability checking, test/tool development, and more. Just as we needed to make some aggressive changes to the project to enable us to reach new levels of quality, so to do I think that forming a testing focused group will enable the project to achieve these other aims.
Anyway, it's too bad that the three responses so far have not been supportive to the idea. I feel very strongly that this change would benefit Inkscape, just as adopting a bug tracker helped stability, establishing open development processes helped usability, and establishing a release process helped installability. Am I the only person that thinks we could benefit from an organized testing community?
Bryce
You ask "Am I the only person that thinks we could benefit from an organized testing community?"
No, I am for the idea in principle but can sense a fear of differentiating between -dev, -test and -user issues and the possibility of total confusion setting in with resulting antipathy.
But I for one would be in a testing process if there were one.
Regards
Adam
On Thu, 4 Aug 2005, bulia byak wrote:
...
sustained discussion of QA topics like usability, testing, and so forth,
Usability is definitely a topic for ALL devs (and users) to discuss.
I'm really glad you said that. :)
Accessibility is for everyone too.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
On Fri, Aug 05, 2005 at 04:15:38PM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
On Thu, 4 Aug 2005, bulia byak wrote:
...
sustained discussion of QA topics like usability, testing, and so forth,
Usability is definitely a topic for ALL devs (and users) to discuss.
I'm really glad you said that. :)
Accessibility is for everyone too.
Hi Alan,
We've talked about accessibility before; do you know if there are any tests or projects that investigate accessibility issues?
Bryce
Subject: Accessibility (a11y) for all [was Re: Usability for All]
I've CC'ed the user list because there is a lot we can all learn and relatively easy ways you can help test the accessibility (a11y) of Inkscape and it can have all kinds of knock on benefits.
On Fri, 12 Aug 2005, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 22:53:20 -0700 From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...69...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...3...> Cc: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: Usability for All [was Re: [Inkscape-devel] Proposal for inkscape-testers]
On Fri, Aug 05, 2005 at 04:15:38PM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
On Thu, 4 Aug 2005, bulia byak wrote:
...
sustained discussion of QA topics like usability, testing, and so forth,
Usability is definitely a topic for ALL devs (and users) to discuss.
I'm really glad you said that. :)
Accessibility is for everyone too.
Hi Alan,
We've talked about accessibility before; do you know if there are any tests or projects that investigate accessibility issues?
Accessibility is one of those things I've always meant to learn more about. Anytime I feel my hands getting sore from too much typing I hope I feel bad about making things more accessible because I'm someday I will probably need it.
The basics you need to consider and which also feed into usability are
1) Can I do everything using only the keyboard? 2) Can everything be themed properly? 3) Can the standard assisitive technologies be used?
1) The point is not that you would necessarily want to work using only a keyboard but making it possible has important side effects.
The more it is possible to do without depending on the two button mouse the better. We will want to be careful to make Inkscape work well with Pen input devices anyway but it is something all developers should be careful about. (Apple ship with a single button mouse by default because of the discipline it forces on developers more than anything else.)
This is something all users can help out with and improvements here should help make Inkscape even better to use when you do have both the mouse and keyboard in action. All you need to do is unplug your mouse (or instead unplug you keyboard and do not use the right click or wheel) and see what you can do. If you keep a diary or log as you go and jot down any problems you might encounter or try and identify any tasks which are extremeley tedious and repetative you could really help find areas which could be improved.
2) High Contrast themes are important. People with vision difficulties, even blind users will want to draw things occasionally. http://dub.washington.edu/projects/ic2d/
3) Standard assistive technologies include Gok, Gnopernicus, Dasher and I'm sure there are more I don't know about yet. Don't make any assumptions about these applications before you have tried them (dont really have time to explain any better).
Accessibility makes it all the more important to use standard widgets most of which have already been accessible whereas rolling your own "innovative" widgets can create a nasty new variety of problems. If custom widgets must be created it is better for us all in the long run to push them down into toolkit. Inkscape has been very good about this and I just want to reassure the developers it is the right thing to do.
Developers should probably check out the two applications at-spi and at-poke, "at" is short for Accessibility Toolkit (also referred to as ATK) and these applications will help you to evaluate your software.
If you are interested in Accessiblity I think it will be important to have a build --with-gnome because I believe including those extra libraries draws in a stack of ATK related libraries which can have some benefits. Of course I care about portability too (portability both to other operating systems and future versions of the toolkits we use) so it is always better when these features are cleanly seperable.
I wrote this all from memory and it summarises a lot of what I have learned about accessiblity over the years. If you ask the accessibility team and read through their documentation I expect there is a lot more you can learn but what I have already mentioned should resemble the Frequently Asked Questions.
Hope that helps.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan Jack of all trades, master of none ;)
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
participants (8)
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Adam Pearson -
Alan Horkan -
Bryce Harrington -
bulia byak -
frank gaude' -
Jon Phillips -
Ted Gould