In Software Development, quality is a must. Every company, from start-ups to market leaders, seek for deliver quality. But the real question is, what quality means?

Quality? What Quality?

According ISO, quality is:

“The totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs”

And it is a very comfortable definition. Only problem is that cannot be used directly to measure the quality level of a working piece of software.

So, some extra work is required. First, I will remove the “or service” part, since I would like to talk about Development.

Business, Process and Product Requirements

For each of us dealing with Software Development, it will sound familiar to say that “stated or implied needs” is an abstract way of naming the Requirements.

So, simplifying the ISO statement, we could say that quality is:

“The totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs Requirements”

Now is crystal clear, isn’t it? (If your answer is ‘yes’, please stop reading this post)

Improvement areas

There are several classifications for the features and characteristic of a product, but I like the ISO 9126:1991 way:

• Functionality: A set of attributes that bear on the existence of a set of functions and their specified properties. The functions are those that satisfy stated or implied needs. (ISO 9126: 1991, 4.1)

• Reliability: A set of attributes that bear on the capability of software to maintain its level of performance under stated conditions for a stated period of time. (ISO 9126: 1991, 4.2)

• Usability: A set of attributes that bear on the effort needed for use, and on the individual assessment of such use, by a stated or implied set of users. (ISO 9126: 1991, 4.3)

• Efficiency: A set of attributes that bear on the relationship between the level of performance of the software and the amount of resources used, under stated conditions. (ISO 9126: 1991, 4.4)

• Maintainability: A set of attributes that bear on the effort needed to make specified modifications. (ISO 9126: 1991, 4.5)

• Portability: A set of attributes that bear on the ability of software to be transferred from one environment to another. (ISO 9126: 1991, 4.6)

What is Quality all about?

Drilling down into the definition of quality until something meaningful happened is far from easy. And the main issue about it is due to the fact that quality is a perception. One single attribute cannot define quality by itself. Deliverance of zero-bug software is a major objective but it cannot be isolated from the rest. A Java function doing nothing will accomplish the goal.

The idea then is to gather as much information from different sources, seeking for a comprehensive list of requirements to fulfill. And, after that, negotiating priorities according Company strategic goals will lead us to the next level.

In next posts we will start the process that (hopefully) will significantly improve current quality level

Given current economic conditions there is considerable interest in open source software and whether open source licensing can help users lower the cost of enterprise computing compared to traditional proprietary licensing.

The 451 Group would like you to contribute to its CAOS Open Source Adoption Survey covering end user attitudes to the potential financial benefits of open source. The survey can be found here

In return for your contribution, you will receive a copy of the research results, which will be delivered in an update to our second Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) research report "Cost Conscious, A practical guide for understanding and calculating the financial benefits of open source for enterprise IT projects". You will also receive an invite to a special 451 Group Webinar at which we discuss these results.

The survey includes about 20 questions. We are not asking for details of specific projects, so no sensitive data will be revealed. We are asking about the benefits and risks of open source in general, and how you evaluated the cost of open source in any relevant projects. All responses are of course confidential. The survey will be available for the next two weeks, but please complete it at your earliest convenience.

Thank you in advance for your participation.

Best regards,

Matthew Aslett/Jay Lyman
CAOS (Commercial Adoption of Open Source)
The 451 Group

• Session/Transaction handling
• User context as a Seam component.

Currently Openbravo ERP 2.50 officially supports PostgreSQL 8.3 and Sun JDK 6. By the time when these versions were taken as our base, PostgreSQL 8.4 did not exist and OpenJDK 6 was an on-going project still not ready. One year later the situation is quite different:

• PostgreSQL 8.4.1 is the latest and greatest of the PostgreSQL releases.
• OpenJDK 6 is completed and a very real alternative to Sun’s JDK.

For those unfamiliar with OpenJDK, here’s a bit of history: on 2006 Sun decided to open their JDK and license it under the GPL. Some work was required for that, though: about 4% of the code was proprietary, dependent on 3rd parties who didn’t want to open those components. So the OpenJDK project started rewriting those parts and getting the rest ready. Now OpenJDK 6 has passed the Technology Compatibility Kit tests and claims to be a fully compatible Java 6 implementation.

Using OpenJDK will allow us to have a 100% open source and free software stack. Also,  as most modern Linux distributions include it as the default JDK, setting up Openbravo ERP will be easier. For example Ubuntu ships OpenJDK as the default one and in the next 10.04 LTS Sun’s JDK will be available in the multiverse repository or in none at all.

On the other hand supporting PostgreSQL 8.4 has the obvious benefits of enjoying the improvements of this new major version.

So let’s play a bit with them to see how they behave with our latest release, Openbravo ERP 2.50MP8.

PostgreSQL 8.4

I’ve run two tests using version 8.4.1:

• Full build of Openbravo ERP 2.50MP8 (ant install.source): no surprises, our code builds cleanly with this new major version. The build times are similar compared to PostgreSQL 8.3.8.
• Functional test (smoke test): this is usually a bit more tricky. But good news! No problems at all, it passes all the smoke test cleanly! Nice.

OpenJDK 6

Now the hard part. Let’s see how it goes:

• Full build of Openbravo ERP 2.50MP8 (ant install.source): ouch, it fails the first time when it minifies the JavaScript files using YUI Compressor. But no worries, it’s a known issue that has a simple workaround, acceptable for now. After deleting the conflictive file the build finishes successfully. So the first big test passed, this looks promising.
• Functional test (smoke test): so I set up Tomcat to run with OpenJDK, start the smoke tests on Openbravo ERP 2.50MP8 and 100% successfully completed! Yes, all of them.

Honestly, I’m quite impressed. I expected PostgreSQL 8.4 to work well, but I didn’t have as much faith on OpenJDK as my fellow Sree had. Congratulations to the OpenJDK team, you’ve done a great job.

Continuous Integration

You want proofs of all this? We’ve set up continuous builds and functional tests of our bleeding edge ERP code. Have a look at the experimental jobs in our build farm. This will help us detecting mismatches between our current stack and the new candidates.

The full builds will be run every 3 days and the smoke tests once per week. You can also check the trend and health of these builds.

Conclusions

My initial conclusions are clearly positive: the core of Openbravo ERP works well with PostgreSQL 8.4 and OpenJDK 6. It’s too early to say when we will officially support them, but this is an important milestone. The continuous builds and tests, as well as some manual QA and developer work will help us on taking the decision.

Continuing with our promised updates about what has been done in the Release Management team during the last 2 weeks, other than the publication of the 2.50MP7 and 2.50MP8 releases.

Homepage face-lift

We have given a face-lift to the Release Management homepage, with the following major changes:

• Release schedules and security have now a greater weight.
• We have updated the our subprojects (what keeps us busy).
• The RM related documentation has been organized into 4 sections.

Automation

• New job to automatically create the API documentation (javadoc) for new maintenance packs.
• Huge progress towards achieving a total release automation.

For a complete list of the on-going stories we’ve been working on, check the Sprint 26 page of our Scrum spreadsheet.

• we wanted easier guidance of teams with little overhead
• we needed to improve transparency for developers (what's coming up, how are we doing)
• we wanted to improve transparency for customers (what's next and where are we in the list of priorities)
• and the same for management (what are the priorities, how much work do we have ahead)
• we wanted to give developers more focus, autonomy and satisfaction
• we wanted to better integrate remote developers

• using the Wiki, we've incorporated many Howto guides into our public Developer's Manual; this is the first step towards learning a topic, step by step
• each student is provided with their own cloud instance of Openbravo ERP where development must be done; these instances are accessed, troubleshot and graded by an Openbravo Training Specialist.
• using an open source elearning platform (www.moodle.org), a virtual classroom is formed where practical assignments are given, results are submitted and problems discussed

Mercurial 1.3 has a nice feature that makes our coding lives easier. You can define your authentication credentials globally, so that it will remember your username, the password, or both in any repository cloned from code.openbravo.com. There’s therefore no need to define the credentials individually in every repository.

Example of the relevant section to be added to $HOME/.hgrc:

[auth]
ob.prefix = code.openbravo.com
ob.username = johndoe
ob.password = supersecret

If you only want it to remember the username, then remove the password line.

And if you still are using an older version (hg version), you can follow these instructions to update to 1.3.1.

For more information about this feature check the hgrc(5) man page.