Hi, my name is Brendan Donegan and I’m one of the test engineers in the Symbian Foundation’s Delivery Management team. I’ve worked on testing Symbian for the whole of my professional life and it’s something I feel very passionate about. I’d like to talk about how the community can participate in ensuring the quality of the Symbian platform.
If I’m honest though it’s not the most obviously exciting thing you can do in the field of software. As a developer you can put a few days or weeks work into developing a new feature and it will be there for all to see by the end of it. As a tester, there will never be any concrete evidence of the work you put in to that same software. For me it’s not about what goes into the software but what doesn’t go in.
I remember a senior colleague asking me if I felt disappointed that my work doesn’t go into devices. My answer to her was that it does, in the form of issues that aren’t present. This is really highlighted when I discover a bug in a released device that was missed during its development.
What prompts these reflections is that I want to talk about what Symbian is looking for in terms of testing from the community. The first rule of testing is that it is impossible to test comprehensively.
Even the most basic piece of a software can have hundreds of possible combinations to test. Imagine what it might be like when the system involved is a multi-million line operating system! What’s more, here in Symbian we don’t have big corporate resources to do extensive testing ourselves. What we would like to achieve is full automation of the test payloads that are delivered with the packages.
Each package already contains a substantial set of tests created by the package maintainers, so we are not starting from scratch. For a system as large as Symbian though, more tests are always welcome. Plus, there are new features constantly being added and these need to be tested too.
One such feature is the Social Mobile Framework that will be contributed to Symbian by Sasken, as mentioned in James Aley’s blog post last month.
In fact, this feature will represent an entirely new package and will be the first Symbian package developed entirely from scratch in the public Symbian repositories.
It would also make sense if this package was tested in public view, so the question is – what do we need from potential contributors? From the actual developer of the new feature we hope to see a willingness to engage in testing and quality related activities and an appreciation of the benefits of making their contribution as rock solid as possible.
These benefits are twofold. For the developer themselves a good quality contribution is important for their reputation in the open-source community. For the community itself a good quality stable product is a valuable asset, as it allows the focus to stay on new and innovative uses of the technology, rather than constantly fixing and working around issues.
It stands to reason then that the community at large, most of all those who will be interested in making use of the feature in question, can gain from having an involvement in ensuring the quality of the platform too.
We are keen to receive interest in testing any new contribution (but particularly a large and complex one like the Social Mobile Framework) and the contribution can take many forms.
Test cases and ways to automate them would be invaluable, as would time spent in using the new feature and identifying issues. By combining community efforts, and utilising the benefits of many pairs of eyes, a level of quality can be achieved that beats closed-source devices.
To get in touch with the test team at Symbian, make your way over to the ‘Testing & Quality Assurance‘ forum on the developer website or post your comments below. You can let us know what kind of contribution you would be interested in and we can point you to appropriate resources.
