Oh bother!

I have spent the past couple of weeks preparing and presenting a demo for my local Linux user group and working on a user manual, not to mention the routine things like checking on the pilot project and mowing the grass. During this time, I have found a few bugs in some of the download files and replaced the ones with errors. None of them are catastrophic, but they do affect some functionality.

This makes me wish for a full-time QA team. When I was working for a company that sold a TCP/IP stack for IBM mainframes, we had one and I came to appreciate what they did, even though they made me rework several fixes. The time and effort it takes to create automated tests, or worse run them manually, is huge.

Realeyes is fairly complex, in that it contains:

• Source packages


• Debian packages


• Configuration scripts for both packages


• C programs


• A database with SQL scripts for building the schema


• A database interface written in Java


• A user interface written in Java


• Configuration file definition forms in the user interface

Thanks to the pilot project, I get to see most of this in use regularly. And the changes I am making these days are mostly in response to issues that come up there. But it would be a fine thing indeed to be able to have an actual QA team.

Later . . . Jim