The Alpha and Beta Test Plan will be slightly different from the traditional CS 481 Test Plan. We wish to bring HummingBird in to the world of free software and continue its development as an open source software product. This development strategy has been used in successful and complicated projects such as the Linux Kernel and will be the development strategy for Netscape's Web browser, Mozilla.
We believe this will be the best path to take to direct HummingBird into to becoming a successfully software product. The development strategy will be directed by the now famous paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond. In this paper is described the requirements and process that an open source project made to become a successful project. We will try to follow the same idea that the author took to make our software successful.
The important points this software will take to follow this development style are the following:
The testers will be anyone that downloads and attempts to install or run the HummingBird software. The software will be available from HummingBird Web Page as a tar, gzip file with installation instructions available with the package. Snapshot releases will be made automatically everyday. Stable releases will be made when the "HummingBird Community" feel that it is stable enough. A majordomo list will be created to handle all email traffic of HummingBird related discussions. All testers will be put on the majordomo list. The project will be directed by a project coordinator such that the coordinator makes all decisions about which features/patches will be put into the source and which will not. The coordinator will also try to direct the project in a way that they see fit. The documentation will be available on the HummingBird Web Page for all users and tests to use. The bug list and bug addition interfaces will be available to all users and tests to use to solve their problems with HummingBird.