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Re: [RFC] Software Process Improvement in Free Software, Closing the Quality Cycle, Inventing Non-Developer-Demotivating QA/QM/SPI



On Mon, Nov 01, 2004 at 07:12:10AM +0100, Thomas Schorpp wrote:
> as i see you try to maintain quality in debian efficently.
> 
> ive been thinking for months now about inventing and adopting
> the SPI-standards cmm(x), spice, iso12207, and iso 9001,
> etc, in free sw's lifecycles
> and would like to ask you about comments and discussion.

I certainly appreciate your efforts, but what I've read until now has a
little bit too high level of buzzwords for me to be able to map your
idea's on Debian. Certainly a lot of improvements are possible in
Debian, but I don't think that can or will happen in one big go, but
rather gradually. I myself have some idea's about that, but didn't yet
invest the time to share them and try to implement them.

Everything within Debian is ultimately a human task, and my focus atm is
to detect if and where there are tasks that have insufficient or
inadequate manpower assigned. This very general sentence catches issues
like inactive maintainers, busy maintainers, wrong people on the wrong
tasks, or tasks that don't have any people assigned to it. I'm currently
in process of a big sweep over all package maintainers, when I'm done,
at least all inactive maintainers should be detected and a solution
found. I've currently mailed 121 different maintainers already, and
still some 60 to go. When I'm done, I'll summarize the results on this
list (or a list with a broader audience).

I'm also paying attention to tasks that are not package maintainance
tasks, but they are more complex to handle as those tasks are of much
more diversity, and also there is much less information available to
assess how it is going, unlike package maintainance, where there is a
plethora of tools and metrics available. Most tasks don't have a BTS
entry, for example.

If you want to contribute to improving Debian's QA, I think it's
essential to learn about how things work in Debian now, so that you can
do smaller and more targetted propositions on improvements. When I've a
bit of time, I'll read through all your texts more thoroughly, to see
whether some idea's can be applied to Debian, I unfortunately didn't
find the time for that yet.

--Jeroen

-- 
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl



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