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One of the key tenets of the open source software (OSS) culture is the belief that working with a diverse developer set provides better quality software than working with a homogenous group of developers at a single company. That does not mean that you don’t still need a process to help assure that theoretically better quality and there’s the rub.

I was recently pointed at the web site, openQA.org, and hooked up with Patrick Lightbody, founder and prime mover of openQA. Patrick is also QA solutions product manager at Gomez, which provides on-demand services to measure and manage website and web application performance and the customer web experience from design and development, through deployment to production.

Quality assurance (QA) processes are as old as the software development process itself. Patrick points out that QA has the same kind of second-class-citizen characteristic in OSS development that it has always had in the proprietary software world. Except the problem is worse because there is no boss to say, “You will do the QA.” OpenQA aims at helping OSS communities and companies that by definition lack the benefit of “the boss” deciding who will do the QA.

OpenQA combines corporate sponsorship and a community approach much like an Apache for QA. It includes projects such as Selenium and its offshoots for rich dynamic web testing and smaller projects such as Watir, which stands for web application testing in Ruby. OpenQA software is distributed under an Apache-type license. Selenium was originally a Thoughtworks project designed to support its consulting practice. A few other contributors added Firefox plug-ins as recorders, some autocomplete features, breakpoints etc. to Selenium leading to Selenium IDE. Even some BEA QA specialists added some code. Given Patrick’s day job, not surprisingly the Gomez Reality Check on-demand service is OSS-based and the code has been placed back into the OpenQA community as Selenium RC.

There are other standalone OSS QA projects such as the PushToTest tools (pushtotest.com) distributed OSS under the Gnu General Public License version 2 (GPL V2), and the WebLoad community founded by established QA software provider, Radview. WebLoad is also licensed under the GPL.

It used to be in analyzing the health of the manufacturing industry in the U.S., you looked at the tool and die makers as leading indicators. I am thinking that the uptake of OpenQA and these other QA-oriented OSS projects may be a leading overall indicator of OSS success as the business model continues to mature in synch with Web 2.0 application development. If OSS is to be adopted by the large enterprises that spend the vast percentage of IT dollars, those enterprises are going to want assurances.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Development |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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