Is it time to stop adding features to soaring software? Is it timeto focus on reliability?

We have 500 unit tests, Max. FIVE-HUNDREDS.
We have a precise alpha and beta phases, scheduling a software delivery
after 10-12 months, only when 500 people are quite confident everything is
ok.
Is it enough to have 500 people doing this work?
I ask because personally I dont trust unit tests, for a simple reason: they
are made to report only if a desired result is obtained or not.
And the real truth is that for most of all functions you cannot check all
"desired results" and thus you are not accomplishing any real auto test.

The reason LK was created is that I was going to spend more time discussing
things with you, than doing them by myself and my own.

I am not going to comment the ridicolous statements by software
manufacturers that dont have innovations in their products, and call this
lack of innovations "desire of simplicity" (De vulpe et uva).



paolo





"Max Kellermann" wrote in message
...

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)