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27
May

Part 3—Inspiration & Acknowledgement

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by Victoria Eastwood     Wed, May 27, 2009

The community associated with an Open Source project is a wonderful thing. This was the part I think I really underestimated. Sure, people post questions and we scurry to provide fast answers. We get questions we don’t expect which teaches us something new. We find out how the product works in various scenarios and applications. We get complaints and grips about this and that. On some days, it’s a challenge to keep on top of all the postings and conversations.

However, there is something so energizing about it all. People all over the world are commenting. You just can’t get that level interaction between your users and the development team. It’s incredibility encouraging when someone praises the product. It’s even more fun when the community starts posting answers to other community member’s questions. It shows their commitment to the product, as they want to share their success with others and help them also be successful.

Too often the engineers are left in the back room, to play with their computers and pump out the next version. They never hear from the users unless there is a major problem. But with open source, they have a new home focused on them and their work. The inspiration this creates simply can’t be replicated.

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Infobright     Tags: challenge, community, development, open+source
15
May

Part 2—Testing & Defects

Victoria Eastwood's photo
by Victoria Eastwood     Fri, May 15, 2009

When you have a new product obviously getting the product stable and shaking out all the bugs is a challenge. I’ve always liked all the silly little terms we use around defects. Like if I picked the product up like a rug and gave it a good shake, all the bugs would fall on the floor and I could just sweep them up. Done!

No matter how cute the terms are around defect removal, the fact is we actually put the nasty critters in the code in the first place. I would also say there is no substitute for good process (design, code reviews, test case reviews, test driven development and the like) in producing good solid code. But just the same, the defects still manage to sneak through. Your chances of 100% clean code drops considerably as the complexity of the application increases too.

So what’s going to shake down the product as fast as possible. Well, just plain usage. The team just doesn’t have access to the variety of data, applications, usage profiles as a few thousand users do. Open source can give your product that kind of exposure. That’s not to say that you should skip the former. Nobody is going to live through a buggy product even if it is free. But when you get the product to the stage when you have exhausted what you can afford or think of in terms of testing, this little difference in the open source model is going to take your product to the next level faster than you could ever accomplish with closed source.

ICE community, keep logging those bugs!

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Infobright     Tags: development, open+source, quality+assurance, testing
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