Re: [eclipse-dev] Bug verification and reopening

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rodrigo, here are some quick answers to your original
questions below...

Rodrigo Rocha Gomes e Souza <rodrigorgs@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote on 10/07/2013 06:41:27 PM:

> * ... there's no testing team; instead, developers
contribute both 
> with fixes and verifications;

Correct.  I suspect dedicated testing teams are
rare in open source projects - you won't find volunteers to do this all
the time and it's not something that companies want to pay for. However
open source projects get testing in different ways. For example there is
a large community of early adopters who download alpha/beta builds and
provide feedback. And then there are companies building hundreds of products
on top of Eclipse, and those product teams have dedicated testers that
trickles down to testing the open source parts as well. In Eclipse there
is also heavy use of automated regression tests.

> * ... often, a developer asks a colleague to
verify his/her fix;

This varies between components. Some components have
only 1 or 2 committers and it is not practical to wait for a verifier.
Some larger teams ask a colleague to verify, or the originator. There is
no fixed process here across the whole project.

> * ... verification is more intense a week before
the next milestone build.

Yes, the entire team does at least one dedicated testing
day in the week of a milestone, and this is likely where the majority of
verification happens.

> * ... verified bugs are 4x less likely to be
reopened when the 
> verifier states that he/she used code review, code inspection etc.

This is an interesting finding. How did you determine
this - just based on the comment that was made at the time the bug was
marked verified? Did you manually categorize these based on comments or
have some heuristic?

John