Re: Software quality metrics in Debian?
Thomas Koch dijo [Sun, May 08, 2011 at 10:09:16AM +0200]:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to hear your opinions about an idea and propose a discussion about it
> on Debconf:
>
> a) Dream: Debian could publish quality metrics about the packaged software in
> a machine readable format.
>
> b) Software quality obviously is not strictly defined. There are metrics that
> could automatically be measured, but the interpretation of the metrics is
> still dependend on personal judgement.
>
> c) Not only can the source code be measured but only the development process:
> Does the project use a (distributed) VCS, Bugtracker, Continuous integration,
> Test coverage, ...? The judgement of these facts is once again a matter of
> personal assessment.
Hi,
I agree with b) - But there are some points that could be gathered and
presented. As an example, in our package build process: How many
packages are built running upstream's test suites? I know I have
disabled them ocassionally because of hard-to-fix corner cases that
were only biting me in the test suites themselves... Of course, that
speaks horribly of me.
Many authors, true, do not provide a test suite at all... So we could
have a three(?)-state definition here:
Runs-tests: (Yes|No|NotAvailable)
Of course, even when available, what's the code coverage they offer?
And even harder than that, what's the quality of the tests? That's
much harder to guess... But having such a field (be it in d/control,
be it anywhere else) could start leading us to one such metric.
Yes, this can lead to a nice BoF :-)
Greetings,
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