[Python-Dev] Stability Metrics [was Stability and Change] (original) (raw)

Christopher Petrilli petrilli@amber.org
Thu, 11 Apr 2002 17:01:46 -0400

On 4/11/02 10:10 AM, "Guido van Rossum" <guido@python.org> wrote:

I think it's nice to keep track of this for ourselves (despite the interpretational problems). But I'm strengthening my position about the use of statistics in communicating to the users: I think that would be bad. Statistics can easily be misused, misinterpreted, and countered.

One project I used to use a lot of is VTK (Visualization ToolKit). They have a rather useful "quality dashboard" that I thought was a great way to get a grasp of the current state of the development tree:

http://public.kitware.com/VTK/Testing/Dashboard/20020411-0300-Nightly/Dashbo ard.html

I hope that comes through. Anyway, it runs full regression testing every night and reports all the issues that come up. They actually run it on a cluster of various platforms and showed the stability on each platform as a matrix:

http://public.kitware.com/VTK/Testing/Dashboard/20020411-0300-Nightly/TestOv erviewByCount.html

Anyway, this I do find useful, if only for a developer who wants to understand issues and where the effects of current development is taking stability.

Chris

| Christopher Petrilli | petrilli@amber.org