- Wed Oct 21, 2009 6:44 pm
#4679
As many of you who follow this forum have noticed, every version of ProcessMaker seems to introduce new bugs. Some of these bugs are rather serious, such as the ones that nelson just found in version 1-2.2838.
With a small development team, ProcessMaker doesn't have much extra manpower to exhaustively test each new release. We have developed a test unit to run sample cases with web services and make sure that processes run correctly, but this doesn't test the ProcessMaker interface and it will miss many types of bugs such as problems with DynaForms and bugs like the ones Nelson found. We have been trying to diligently test all the new features in each new release (believe me we found a whole bunch of bugs and squashed them by testing release 1-2.2838), but some bugs just aren't apparent until a large number of people start running real processes on ProcessMaker.
Currently ProcessMaker doesn't have a public beta testing program for each new release, because ProcessMaker doesn't currently have a way to roll-back to a previous version if a problem arises. However, I was thinking that it wouldn't be that hard to add a new feature which would make a clone of ProcessMaker's code and process data, so people could do beta testing on that clone without worrying about their processes which are already in production.
The bigger question is whether enough people who use and care about ProcessMaker would be willing to volunteer to beta test the new versions of ProcessMaker to help catch bugs. I realize that ProcessMaker isn't the most exciting piece of software. It doesn't exactly arouse the same levels of personal interest and passion as the latest Linux kernel modules or first-person-shooter games. Still, ProcessMaker is critical for the people who use it.
My question for all of you who use ProcessMaker is whether you would be willing to participate in beta testing of new versions of ProcessMaker. If you would be interested, how would you like the beta testing to be conducted?
I haven't discussed this idea with any of the ProcessMaker developers yet, but I would like to know if people in the community would be willing to do beta-testing. If nobody seems interested here in the forum, I won't bother suggesting the idea to the developers.
What do you all think?
With a small development team, ProcessMaker doesn't have much extra manpower to exhaustively test each new release. We have developed a test unit to run sample cases with web services and make sure that processes run correctly, but this doesn't test the ProcessMaker interface and it will miss many types of bugs such as problems with DynaForms and bugs like the ones Nelson found. We have been trying to diligently test all the new features in each new release (believe me we found a whole bunch of bugs and squashed them by testing release 1-2.2838), but some bugs just aren't apparent until a large number of people start running real processes on ProcessMaker.
Currently ProcessMaker doesn't have a public beta testing program for each new release, because ProcessMaker doesn't currently have a way to roll-back to a previous version if a problem arises. However, I was thinking that it wouldn't be that hard to add a new feature which would make a clone of ProcessMaker's code and process data, so people could do beta testing on that clone without worrying about their processes which are already in production.
The bigger question is whether enough people who use and care about ProcessMaker would be willing to volunteer to beta test the new versions of ProcessMaker to help catch bugs. I realize that ProcessMaker isn't the most exciting piece of software. It doesn't exactly arouse the same levels of personal interest and passion as the latest Linux kernel modules or first-person-shooter games. Still, ProcessMaker is critical for the people who use it.
My question for all of you who use ProcessMaker is whether you would be willing to participate in beta testing of new versions of ProcessMaker. If you would be interested, how would you like the beta testing to be conducted?
I haven't discussed this idea with any of the ProcessMaker developers yet, but I would like to know if people in the community would be willing to do beta-testing. If nobody seems interested here in the forum, I won't bother suggesting the idea to the developers.
What do you all think?
The only thing it doesn't do is automate the installation process (at least I don't think it does-- I haven't examined the code to make sure).
- By Simpleplan