[Lazarus] Release schedule and policy

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 11:37 AM, Michael Van Canneyt
<michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
>> Unit testing a GUI application is considerably harder (but not
>> impossible),
>> but testing a framework like LCL is not that difficult.
>
> To me, these statements sound contradictory, since LCL is a GUI framework ?
>
> How can one test that setting
>  MyLabel.Caption:='Some UTF8 string with weird characters';
> will actually display the correct string ?

Actually it isn't impossible to do this. What I do all day is exactly
writing automated test suites and semi-automated ones.

The most common solution is doing a semi-automated test. The test
suite does operation X and then asks the tester if the result is the
expected. He chooses Yes or No. You can also make automated versions
which use for example image-to-text technology.

Usually both tests are necessary, both automated and semi-automated,
and also a few fully manual tests are required.

> But it is beside the point. I do not believe that a testsuite will actually
> make it less work to manage the patches.

That is correct. Only for very intrusive changes a full test suite
should be run for each patch. Testing is done more statistically,
running the test periodically, let's say once a day. Not once per
commit. Even in companies with lot's of full time Quality Assurance
Engineers.

Anyway, having a test suite is good, but not indispensable.

I will try to improve this when I find time, but it won't solve the
issue that we need more people working on the task of verifying that a
release X or branch Y is ready for releasing.

-- 
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho