Difference between revisions of "Development/Software Engineering Framework"

Revision as of 07:48, 3 July 2008

This page is intended to be a summary of the tools used by the KDE project for Software Engineering tasks, i.e. everything around coding work. This includes bugfixing, review, testing, documentation, requirements etc.

The current tool used by KDE should be listed along with the extent of its use, known alternatives, and advantages/disadvantages.

Development Tools

Source Control

Current State	People
Subversion 1.4	The kde sysadmin team: Dirk Muller David Faure
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-scm-interest	git bazaar mercurial Gitorious

Subversion 1.4 is currently used for source control management in KDE on a server hosted in Frankfurt. A separate server is used for access to the read-only mirror anonsvn.kde.org.

There is interest in migrating to a distributed source control management tool, such as GIT. Discussion of this is taking place on the kde-scm-interest mailing list.

Build System

Current State	People
CMake Custom CMake module documentation	Alexander Neundorf
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-buildsystem	n/a

CMake is the build tool currently used by KDE. It is Free Software developed by kitware inc and available on multiple platforms supported by KDE.

This tool was chosen as the buildsystem for the KDE4 series, and there are no plans currently to migrate away from it.

Identifier search

Current State	People
http://lxr.kde.org	The kde sysadmin team: Dirk Müller David Faure
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
n/a	n/a

LXR indexes classes and methods used in KDE. This can be useful for finding examples of how to use a class, and finding all uses of a class while refactoring or updating API.

Review

Patch review (pre commit)

Current State	People
Review-board used by plasma project. trunk/kdereview	David Solbach and the kde sysadmin team maintain the Plasma review-board installation.
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-core-devel: Discuss KDE patch review and tools	Launchpad.net offers merge review/approval pre-merge [1] [2] [3]

In general KDE does not have a formal patch review policy for individual patches. Some patches do get reviewed prior to committing to svn by the relevant mailing lists. This is the case for particularly large patches or patches by new developers.

As an official policy kdereview is used to review new applications and new classes for kdelibs prior to inclusion in KDE trunk. A drawback of this system is that not all reviewers report that they have reviewed the new content. It may make sense to have a checklist for reviewers to use, eg,

All new classes documented [x]
Private classes and d-pointers used where appropriate [x]
Passes all krazy checks [ ]
No obvious security concerns [ ]
Designed well/maintainable [ ]
etc...

Commit review (after commit)

Current State	People
kde-commits mailing list records all commits to KDE svn. The commit filter is used to filter relevant commits based on path of the commit. SVN `CCMAIL:` feature used to notify relevant mailing lists or individuals of specific commits. SVN `BUG:` feature used to close bugs, and also notifies all bug subscribers of the commit.	Unknown
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-commits	Unknown

The commit filter is used by several projects to forward all commits to the relevant mailing list.

Design Review

Current State	People
Design review takes place on mailing lists project wikis face-to-face/BOF sessions and sprints kdereview	Unknown
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-core-devel is used to announce new additions to kdereview.	n/a

KDE does not have an offical design review process. Some design review takes place as part of the kdereview process. It may be possible to further formalise this or encourage design documentation.

Documentation

Technical documentation

Current State	People
http://techbase.kde.org http://wiki.kde.org http://wiki.koffice.org	Danimo is the MediaWiki admin for techbase.kde.org.
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-www	n/a

techbase.kde.org is a MediaWiki powered site used for collaborating on technical tasks such as tutorials, schedules, and project information. wiki.kde.org is a tiki-wiki site with the same function. Both are actively used. It might make sense to merge the two sites.

API documentation

Current State	People
Doxygen is used to generate api documentation from documentation strings in code.	Allen Winter administers api.kde.org.
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
APIDOX tutorials Make KDE API docs better.	doxygen2qthelp used by trolltech to create qt documentation.

KDE API doucmentation is generated nightly and hosted on http://api.kde.org. It is also possible to generate the same documentation locally for use in an IDE for example.

User documentation

Current State	People
meinproc is used to generate user documentation kde-docbook Records all SVN commits with the GUI magic word.	Unknown
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-doc-english Used to coordinate user documentation. kde-docbook Help update documentation after GUI changes.	n/a

User documentation is generated from module doc/ folders and hosted on http://docs.kde.org.

meinproc is a KDE tool (written by Stephen Kulow which uses libxslt to transform docbook into (bzipped) html. At runtime kio_help opens that bzipped html and displays it to the user in khelpcenter.

Testing and Quality

Bug tracking

Current State	People
Bugzilla 2.x. KBugBuster	Matt Rogers and the kde sysadmin team maintain the KDE bugzilla installation.
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-core-devel Discuss alternative bug trackers for KDE. kde-bugs-dist Records all updates on bugs.kde.org. kdelibs-bugs Records all updates to kdelibs bugs. kdevelop-bugs Records all updates to kdevelop bugs. amarok-bugs-dist Records all updates to amarok bugs.	https://bugs.launchpad.net, Leonev trac

Bug tracking in KDE currently is managed using Bugzilla 2.0. There is work being done on a transition to Bugzilla 3.0, which provides some additional features.

Bugzilla can be difficult to use and daunting to newbies.

Static code analysis

Current State	People
Krazy hosted at EnglishBreakfastNetwork (EBN).	Adriaan de Groot Allen Winter
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
	n/a

Additional checks are always welcome for adding to Krazy. See http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/quality/.

Build testing

Current State	People
Continuous build server reports broken builds on linux. CDash build server stores results of non-linux builds for kdelibs.	Dirk Mueller maintains the dashboard Bill Hoffman is involved with the kitware CDash service. http://www.cdash.org/mailinglist.html
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-core-devel Find out how to submit test build results.	n/a

There is interest in more build testing for KDE especially on non-linux platforms. Improvements include some standard ctest scripts that can be used to build and submit a dashboard result for kdelibs to CDash. This would be run on a cronjob for simplicity.

Builds are planned for the following platforms:

Windows
MacOS
FreeBSD 6 (gcc)
FreeBSD 7 (gcc)
Solaris (S10, S11) on SPARC and amd64

Unit testing

Current State	People
Unit tests may be written with the QTest framework. Tests can be run with the command '`make test`'.	Unknown
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
	n/a

It may be possible run run these tests automatically possibly on EBN or on Dirks dashboard.

Quality testing

Current State	People
The early adopter/user community SQO-OSS	Adriaan de Groot Paul Adams
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
	n/a

It may be possible to obtain metrics such as bugs per kloc, defect injection rate etc.

Profiling and Optimizations

Current State	People
kde-optimize mailing list coordinates optimizations in KDE. Krazy also includes some optimization checks.	Unknown
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-optimize	n/a

Tutorials may be provided in the future to help developers optimize their code.

Accessibility and Usability

Current State	People
http://usability.kde.org/ http://openusability.org/projects.php Season of usability	Celeste Lyn Paul Ellen Reitmayr
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-usability	n/a

Research

Current State	People
http://research.kde.org SQO-OSS http://nepomuk.kde.org/ Semantic desktop project funded by the EU.	Adriaan de Groot Sebastian Trueg leads the kde-nepomuk project.
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
n/a	n/a

Marketing and Expectations

Requirements Gathering

Current State	People
Requirements come from user feedback on http://bugs.kde.org and from commercial interests. Developers may do some research into requirements for applications based on User Research Profiles.	Unknown
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
http://bugs.kde.org Fill new wishlist items. kde-core-devel Discuss new ways for kde to gather requirements.	n/a

Promotion

Current State	People
The KDE marketing team manage marketing and promotion from official kde sources. http://dot.kde.org is the community forum around promotional announcements. http://www.kde.org/announcements is the official source of promotional announcements regarding KDE. Design and maintenance of KDE websites is organised on the kde-www mailing list	Wade Olsen Troy Unrau Jos Poortvliet
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-promo Submit dot articles	n/a

Community management

Current State	People
A community management group is being worked on.	Unknown
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-core-devel Discuss how KDE should approach community management.	n/a

As of June 2008 there is a lot of discussion around poisonous people resulting from the KDE user base growing into more channels. Community members are consuming information from different sources (sometimes intended as developer communication), and expecting greater stability from their software (even if it is pre-release).

Future work in this area will include

Moderation on some community portals.
Mediation
A code of conduct?

Communication

Current State	People
Developers communicate with each other through mailing lists IRC Blogs Conferences Developers communicate with users though Blogs to some extent (mainly early adopting users). Forums to some extent where the developer chooses to. News announcements	Chris Lee administers planetkde.org
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
	n/a

Release

Release Scheduling

Current State	People
Maintained at Schedules.	Cyrill Berger - KOffice release coordinator. Allen Winter - KDEPIM release coordinator.
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
release-team	n/a

Feature planning

Current State	People
Schedules/KDE4/4.1_Feature_Plan Schedules/KDE4/4.2_Feature_Plan	The KDE release team
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-core-devel - Discuss the KDE approach to feature planning.	Launchpad.net offers a blueprints system. Scrum in Open Source Projects

Currently techbase is used for feature planning but there may be better alternatives.

Theming and Translations

Artwork

Current State	People
The kde-artists team creates offical artwork for KDE.	Nuno Pinheiro
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-artists	n/a

Additional contributed artwork is available on http://kde-look.org.

There may be a need to create tutorials on how to create artwork for kde.

Translation

Current State	People
http://i18n.kde.org/ is used for level of completion of translations in KDE. GNU gettext is used for translation in KDE. `.po` files are edited directly in KDE svn to update translations. A kde4 based translation client (lokalize) is being developed in kdesdk/. Krazy includes sanity checks/plurals checking for translation.	Unknown
Get Involved	Alternative Tools
kde-i18n-doc	launchpad.net features a web-based tool called rosetta, which allows for easier fly-by translations.

@@ Line 61: / Line 61: @@
 | people=
 The kde sysadmin team:
-* [http://wire.dattitu.de/authors/2-Dirk Dirk Muller]
+* [http://wire.dattitu.de/authors/2-Dirk Dirk Müller]
 * [http://www.kdab.net/~dfaure/ David Faure]
 }}
 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXR_Cross_Referencer LXR] indexes classes and methods used in KDE. This can be useful for finding examples of how to use a class, and finding all uses of a class while refactoring or updating API.
 == Review ==