October Quality Assurance Meeting -- Thursday, October 1st 2020 šŸŽƒ

Quality Assurance
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ROS Friends,

The next ROS Quality Assurance Working Group will take place on: 2020-10-01T14:00:00Z ā†’ 2020-10-01T15:00:00Z I will try to record the video and post it afterwards. The freshly minted Doctor Adam Alami will be talking about his most recent work.

I believe we have open slots if not for November then December. If you would like to speak please let me know. If I donā€™t find a speaker I might propose either (a) a lightning round with brief work updates or (b) a stack introduction session (comparing and contrasting various QA software / process stacks).

Meeting Details:

Join by phone

ā€Ŗ(US) +1 617-675-4444ā€¬ PIN: ā€Ŗ456 561 685 9668ā€¬#

The event details should be on the ROS 2 events calendar .

Speaker:
Doctor Adam Alami from the IT University of Copenhagen

Title:

The Other Side of Quality: How Do FOSS Communities Achieve Quality Using Social and Organizational Norms?

Abstract:

Although FOSS has the unique characteristics of being an information product, a user innovation, and the result of a highly modular design, these factors do not fully explain why FOSS produces high quality products. It is understood that quality assurance techniques, methods and tools are deployed in FOSS development process to control quality. However, these practices are not the only source of quality. For example, additional factors that may explain this phenomenon are conditions that foster pro-social intrinsic motivation. This work asks how do social, organizational and disciplinary factors contribute to maintaining software quality in FOSS Communities?

This is a mixed methods study. Mixed methods research is a methodology for conducting research that involves collecting, analysing and integrating quantitative (e.g., surveys) and qualitative (e.g., field observations, interviews) research. I conducted 82 interviews with FOSS contributors and maintainers. I also conducted a survey with participants (N=387) from 15 FOSS communities.

My work demonstrates that quality has social, organizational and disciplinary dimensions that should be acknowledged, nurtured and studied further. Software quality is achieved by technical and non-technical instruments. This implies that managing and implementing software quality necessitate also managing and nurturing non-technical mechanisms. For example, passion for developing software should be acknowledged, nurtured and rewarded. Another example, software development projects should embrace quality and pitch it as a fundamental believe rather than just merely a checklist.

5 Likes
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Really nice! This event still needs to be added to the calendar, right?

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Looks like it didnā€™t grab the ROS calendar when I copied it from September. Fixed now.

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Hi everyone,

The one or other might remember the ROScan topic I presented in January.

The work results are available now.

Within a small group, we discussing a good way to link the result to the ROS packages.

In short: The easy way would be to create an issue and a belonging pull request to add the license info file for each package.

So this change will have an impact to all ROS packages, and thatā€™s why we think it is necessary to talk about within the quality assurance working group (QAWG).

My overall question is: How to proceed to coordinate the roll-out of this change?

Is this topic something that needs to be presented and discussed within one of the next QA meetings? If so, I would like to ask for one of the time slots. @Katherine_Scott

Or is there any other/better way to get an ā€œapprovalā€ from the QAWG?

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My current understanding is that @Alami needs 40-45 min. If you think twenty minutes is enough to start the conversation we can add it to the agenda. Otherwise we can slot you in for November.

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I think 15 min - 20 min are perfect to the start the conversation. So as far as it is free, I would take the slot at the October meeting.

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Alright. Iā€™ll add you to the agenda! See you Thursday.

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Weā€™re live. Drop by if you can.

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Video has been uploaded and is currently processing.

@Alami Can you please share links to your papers? There was some great source material in there.

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Just a heads up. Looks like the video didnā€™t render out properly and got cut off half-way. Iā€™ll re-render and re-upload it shorty.

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Here is the list of the papers I included in my talk.

Alami A, Dittrich Y, Wasowski A. Influencers of quality assurance in an open source community. In2018 IEEE/ACM 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE) 2018 May 27 (pp. 61-68). IEEE.

Alami A, Cohn ML, Wąsowski A. Why does code review work for open source software communities?. In2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2019 May 25 (pp. 1073-1083). IEEE.

Alami A, Wąsowski A. Affiliated participation in open source communities. In2019 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) 2019 Sep 19 (pp. 1-11). IEEE.

Alami A, Nielsen PA, Wasowski A. A tailored participatory action research for foss communities. Empirical Software Engineering. 2020 Sep;25(5):3639-70.

Alami A, Cohn ML, Wąisowski A. How Do FOSS Communities Decide to Accept Pull Requests?. In Proceedings of the Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering 2020 Apr 15 (pp. 220-229).

Most PDFs are available online.

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@Katherine_Scott - Are meeting notes posted here from the QA WG meetings? Iā€™d like to know what work is going on around standard testing methods for ROS, if any.

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Iā€™ve recorded the last few meetings in lieu of notes.. The last one cut off towards the end and I havenā€™t re-uploaded them. I believe that as it stands we refer people to REP-2004 for testing. I believe REP-2004 specifies the type of testing to be done but isnā€™t prescriptive in how it is is implemented. Iā€™ve been saying for awhile that I would love to create a ROS 2 ā€œtemplateā€ repository that has stubs and examples for meeting the top quality levels for REP-2004. If someone was willing to put donate engineering time I would love to help out; I really donā€™t have the bandwidth to do it all myself.

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Thatā€™s what I was wondering if anyone in the QA WG was already working on. We have a lot of people that we work with that donā€™t know what tests to write or how to write them for testing their robot software in simulation. We talked about creating a framework for that but would prefer to standardize with the community if we do.

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Submitting a proposal / spec to the QAWG would probably be a good start. I would follow REP-2004 as a baseline. In my mind this looked like a dead simple ā€œrobotā€ system with toy implementations of most of the common ROS features in C++ and Python. Happy to chat more on this out of band.

I know @brawner was handling REP-2004 compliance for a minute. If we could automate assessment of REP-2004 compliance that would also be a big win.

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