[SMW-devel] Code quality, and how to improve it

[Jeroen De D. <jer...@gm...>]

In reply to what Markus wrote in a previous email: "In order for me to make
informed decisions about when to release the next version, it would be
useful if SVN committers would let me know when major fixes (or other
important extensions of the functionality) have been implemented. Another
aspect of this is code quality: it is always good to have another developer
look at changes before they are shipped with the new version."

After making regular commits to SMW over the past 3 months, I realize two
things greatly hinder the ability of people who do not know the whole
codebase and the expected behaviour of all features: testability and review.

Like Markus noted, review is always good. Unfortunately no one is doing it
right now (as far as I know), as the SMW commits are just getting deferred
on the MediaWiki code review tool [0]. I think it'd be awesome if some
people where willing to help out reviewing. If my commits to SMW get
reviewed, I'm quite willing to help out to :)

Testing for bugs and regressions is very difficult in a codebase as complex,
and unfortunately not very modular (yet), as SMW. This is true especially if
you do not know the exact expected behaviour off all  the features that are
affected by any changes you make. In my experience, you simply miss bugs
altogether, since there is no testing framework or so to test the code
against, and simply might mistake regressions for the expected behaviour. A
bunch of tests to run SMW against would be extremely useful. What I used to
do is trigger the SMW data refresh script via SMWAdmin, and then run it via
RunJobs and see if there are any errors or warnings, but my wiki simply does
not have all SMW features used on it. Does anybody have a better way of
testing SMW, or an idea of how to create it?

The current lack of review and testability encourages people to just hack on
top of the SMW core code, instead of going for better approaches that
require changes in SMW itself.

[0]
http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Code/MediaWiki/path&path=%2Ftrunk%2Fextensions%2FSemanticMediaWiki

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Jeroen De Dauw
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