On Sat, 24 Sep 2005 11:51:42 +0100, David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com> wrote:
Again, and as I mentioned to John, there are allways room for improvement, but I do think the boost developers do a lot. I bring this up because it is a genuine concern whenever you deal with sub-contractors or whatever, and it also apply to use of open source.
I understand the notion of QA in general, but I want to know specifically what you think QA should look like, or look more like, for Boost.
Boost and or Boost Consulting could possibly make a more prominent reference to QA efforts and procedures on their web sites. At least have a bullet for it an tie together the procedures you have with peer reviews, testing, regression testing, bug tracking, change management, public developer mailing list. Then you can call this web page and its guidelines your Quallity Assuruance Plan.
Okay, that's a great idea. Boost Consulting's website desperately needs an overhaul anyway.
I'm going to need to do a formal assessment of the 'quality' of Boost libraries and so this caught my eye. I did some more reading on the Boost web site about the review procedures, code guidelines, etc., etc. It seems to me that Boost has its procedures in place and documented and what would help someone assessing Boost is a higher profile for them. So I'd support the idea of a page called something like Quality Assurance Plan. Perhaps a section for library development and one on Boost releases with links to the existing guidelines. One thing I don't see documented is how review managers are selected (beyond there being a queue which the Review Wizard manages). The peer review allows anyone to submit comments and it's up to the review manager and library author to consider them. How do we know that the review manager has suitable experience of Boost and C++ (or whatever) to carry out his/her role? Ultimately it seems that the quality of Boost rests on the experience of its library authors and reviewers, so how does an observer assess that? Richard