Open Source Summit + ELC North America 2020

Open Source communities typically focus on core functionality rather than aspects like performance and quality. The standard process followed across communities is such that the open source code is adopted and commercialized by different vendors and each vendor takes it through their downstream integration, system and performance tests.

While the development community feels a sense of pride contributing towards open source, the test community feels a little left out as most open source projects relies on automated functional tests; and the current level of testing by the community falls short of what is needed for a platform or enterprise-ready product. Consequently, each of the vendors or distributors has to put in parallel and often overlapping efforts to validate different architectures or configurations.

Quality of open source projects can be significantly improved if a better path is set for quality and test engineers to contribute. This is a call-to-action and proposed here are a few changes that the open source community can take to engage test engineers better and leverage from their expertise.