On Tuesday, December 11, 2012 1:53:16 AM UTC+1, son_of_flubber wrote:
An open source software project like XCSoar is in a good position to do this, because the developers are only paid in kudos, glory, and self-satisfaction. (There is no revenue stream to maintain). There are proven techniques for finding hidden defects, for example 1)Code inspection 2)Functional testing 3)Exhaustive model-based automated testing.

As Roel already said, we have many unit tests already, but not enough, there is never enough. Since the first day I joined the XCSoar project as a developer, I have worked on separating out code to run in isolated unit tests. (Which, by the way, was the very reason the LK8000 was created: because the LK8000 developer thought this was a bad idea, and so he left us - LK8000 still doesn't have a single unit test.)

You are welcome to inspect the XCSoar source code and write more unit tests.. We would very much like to see more manpower put into it. Not because we think that XCSoar is in a bad shape; it's pretty stable and the code has become quite good over the years. But with more manpower, we could do so much more.

Don't talk about how others should or could do something, just do it yourself. Join our IRC channel and talk to us: http://www.xcsoar.org/discover/irc..html (#xcsoar on irc.freenode.net)