Paul Brook writes ("Re: [Qemu-devel] Suggestion for testing framework"):
We were talking about a tester that does periodic long running tests off svn
trunk, and reports the results. Individual developers are not directly
involved.
Just reporting the results is all very well, but as others have said
testing is only useful with a very firm commitment to deal with the
results of reports. Few Free Software projects can manage to do this
without some kind of formal and automatic linkage of QA passes into
code distribution or propagation. Without that, continuous discipline
is needed - and if it ever slips, the test failures become an
ever-deepening swamp.
One common approach to this problem used with success in very
different ways by both Debian and Xen and probably many others, is to
maintain parallel branches: one (call it `unstable') is changed
freely, and the other (call it `testing') is updated from unstable
only when the QA criteria (whatever those are) are met.