[Python-Dev] Stability Metrics [was Stability and Change]

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