Software Quality and Testing in MySQL

In traditional companies a QA organization is formed and evolves in parallel and along side the development organization as a whole. With open source companies, internal QA is a group that typically is formed at a later stage after the development organization and the community is already established.

In its early days MySQL has based its initial quality and testing efforts in community testing. Over the years internal QA efforts have developed internally in the company and have evolved from no internal QA with complete reliance on the community, to some internal testing focused in specific areas of the product to a full fledged QA organization.

This presentation will walk through the integrating of the QA organization in MySQL and will focus on the current activities of the group. Specifically, the following will be discussed:

• The QA process employed during the product development and release cycles for: o Code and design reviews o Test development o Testing throughout the development cycle o Release cycle
• Tools used for testing and test deployment
• Test suites and what they do. o The focus of the different test suite (functional, system, performance). o Testing on different Platforms and configurations. o Variants of testing cycles (frequency of running and different scopes of testing)
• The Integration testing of MySQL server with other MySQL products (Connectors etc.)
• The QA organization over the years o Address the changing quality needs o Adapting processes and tools o Establishing Quality Practices
• Quality metrics o Metrics and reporting of bug counts and trends. o Bug inflow management, the parameters being used to prioritize handling of bug fixes

The presentation will include examples from the 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0 projects, will demonstrate the different levels of involvement and the challenges the QA organization had in each.