Announcing the KDE Quality Team

The KDE Community is pleased to announce the launch of the Quality
Team Project, a community of contributors who will serve as a
gateway between developers and users in the KDE Project, and as a new
way for people to begin contributing.

KDE is a very attractive project, offering high quality software
and is freely available. There is a lot of people who feel the urge
to give something back, but stop in the middle of the way, frustrated
by the steep learning curve. The aim of the project is to reduce
these barriers by welcoming these potential contributors, and by
offering documentation, support, and even guidance if requested.

The objective is to support the new contributors, programmers or
not, in order to improve all areas of a given application (instead of
a given area of the whole project), working orthogonally with the
maintainers, developers, documenters, interface designers and
artists.

Have you ever wished to help KDE in some way, but never knew how?
The KDE Quality Team might be just what you need! People with
disparate backgrounds can join the KDE Quality Team Project, for the
development of a complex desktop environment requires a wide range of
skills. The main tool to help any application is knowing well its
interface and functions, so any user who knows and cares for any KDE
application can almost immediately help the project. Depending on the
team member programming knowledge, artistic and writing skills or
willingness to learn, there is no area of the application that cannot
be improved.

In terms of support for new contributors, the project already
offers:

• A complete
  and safe step by step building guide, with information to help
  you decide what to build, to solve build problems, and to run the
  new KDE build.
• A guide
  to help you maintain a CVS working folder, providing with all
  you need know to set up your sources, update, apply patches and
  submit your changes to KDE, either by generating patches or
  committing.
• A guide to help you contribute to KDE, the Quality
  Team HOWTO.

In an interview conducted by Henrique Pinto, Carlos Woelz, the person who is currently putting
the most effort in the project, speaks about the
project:

Why there is need for a KDE Quality Team?

There are many people out there who want to contribute, but didn't
manage to know where to start, specially non programmers or at least
non unix programmers. To them, this is a whole new world (CVS, compiling, docbook, xhtml, etc...). I think there is no better way to help KDE
than to support these newcomers.

If you are curious about the original motivation, you can read the original
proposal.

What was the inspiration for such a project?

When I started thinking about giving something back to KDE, I had
trouble knowing where to start. There is a lot of good information at
developer.kde.org, but
(obviously) much of it is oriented to unix developers. I felt a bit
lost, the learning curve is steep for someone like me coming from the
windows world. Also, I started working with applications I knew too
little, and with too many of them at the same time.

In which ways KDE will benefit from having a Quality Team?

The KDE developers have been doing a great job. My hope is that we
can bring the documentation, artwork, communication with our users,
and the little boring details of the user interface to the same level
of quality of the KDE applications. Also, managing bugs and wishes can
help programmers focus on fixing bugs and adding new features.

How can one get involved with the Team?

If you are an experienced contributor, and are interested in
guiding and reviewing the new contributors work, join the kde-quality
mailing list. If you like a KDE application and want to help, join
the kde-quality mailing list.

For new contributors, there are many different ways
to help the KDE project. We have a
collection of tasks, with the necessary skills on how to perform
them, and links to guides on how to perform them at the KDE Quality
Website:

http://quality.kde.org/develop/modules/index.php

The KDE PIM module was chosen as recommended initial target for
the KDE Quality Team because of its shorter release cycle, so things
are going faster there. There is wiki a page to coordinate the
efforts for the PIM Quality Team, where you can have an idea of the
current efforts.

http://wiki.kdenews.org/tiki-index.php?page=Quality+Team+KDE+PIM

How will be the relationship between Quality Team members and
application maintainers?

The maintainer and developers know the functionality of the
application better then anyone, therefore their help and review is
needed for all activities around that application. This stresses the
importance of doing serious work. If the team does good work, I am
sure it will be respected and helped by the maintainers.

I couldn't be happier with the response from the community to this
project. The KDE PIM developers, for instance, were planning to start
something similar to the KDE Quality Team. We joined forces, Adriaan
de Groot is the Quality Team Coordinator for KDE PIM, and they put a
KDE PIM page with information about the PIM tasks at the KDE PIM
site:

http://pim.kde.org/development/janitor_jobs/

How many people are involved in the project in this initial
stage?

Already more than I imagined. The project in integrating nicely to
KDE normal development process.

How do you envision KDE and the KDE Quality Team one year from
now?

I don't try to envision anything. What I am sure is that I will
help the KDE project. All the work put on the Quality Team (writing
guides, the website, the structure, etc...) has already produced good
documentation. I am not worried about it, because any time spent with
the project will be well spent.