Hi all, I have 2 brief responses:
1. QA is a very important part of the Opencast Matterhorn value proposition, so it's great to see an offer of investment in this area. 2. While recognizing that Entwine is taking the initiative here, it's conceivable that in the future other commercial partners may also offer QA resources or get involved in various ways. So I think it would be most appropriate to define a community process with specific roles, and that Entwine offers people and expertise to contribute to that process, rather than being a "co-owner" in some way of the QA function. So for example if there's a "QA Lead" role and an Entwine member carries out that function, then Entwine is supporting the community function of QA Lead, rather than owning the QA Lead function (in a corporate sense). I think this is largely consistent with what Andy suggests below, but just want to make my viewpoint clear. Regards Stephen Stephen Marquard, Acting Director Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town http://www.cet.uct.ac.za Email/IM/XMPP: [email protected] Phone: +27-21-650-5037 Cell: +27-83-500-5290 >>> Andy Wasklewicz <[email protected]> 11/2/2011 8:50 AM >>> Dear Community Members: I would like to make the following proposal on behalf of Entwine: Entwine recognizes that quality assurance is often tedious, demanding and thankless work. There are unique aspects that require expertise to define processes and best practices to create a sustainable and successful project. Based on our software and systems engineering experience, Entwine desires to take a lead role in resolving outstanding Matterhorn bugs, increasing reliability, writing tests, documentation and developing a long term QA process. Entwine proposes to partner with the community and match dollar-for-dollar contributions made to this effort. As you can imagine, this is a significant donation for Entwine and an acknowledgement that a robust platform will contribute to the growth of the community and increase adoption. Benefits of this approach include: - Entwine will provide community leadership by recommending processes for a streamlined and sustainable QA process - Entwine engineering will solve technical or process issues in-turn increasing the quality and robustness of Matterhorn - A well planned QA strategy will increase long-term productivity of the community - Reduced costs for adopting institutions - Add or improve documentation - Improve installation and configuration experience - Increased support during releases Entwine and the Opencast community will need to collaboratively define a process to label and prioritize outstanding tasks, bugs, etc. We propose that identified tasks fall within these categories: - Documentation - Installation process - Tests - Robustness - Bug fixes Entwine will not work on new "new features" as part of this process. We hope that our leadership role will aide institutions and individuals in understanding that robustness should be a priority and invest accordingly by committing to partner with Entwine and other community members to write documentation, improve error handling and writing unit and integration tests. Quality assurance is a continuous process and success will be realized only if all community members recognize its importance. If you are interested in contributing to this effort, please contact Andy Wasklewicz or Tobias Wunden. To make the process transparent to the community, Entwine proposes that contributions are displayed on the Opencast and Entwine site (http://entwinemedia.com). Entwine would also post a monthly QA/work synopsis that details the bugs, documentation and issues completed by our team to date so that contributors and the community can track progress. The Entwine team looks forward to discussing this proposal with the community. Thanks, Andy Wasklewicz Co-Founder, Entwine ### UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN This e-mail is subject to the UCT ICT policies and e-mail disclaimer published on our website at http://www.uct.ac.za/about/policies/emaildisclaimer/ or obtainable from +27 21 650 9111. This e-mail is intended only for the person(s) to whom it is addressed. If the e-mail has reached you in error, please notify the author. If you are not the intended recipient of the e-mail you may not use, disclose, copy, redirect or print the content. If this e-mail is not related to the business of UCT it is sent by the sender in the sender's individual capacity. ### _______________________________________________ Matterhorn-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn-users
