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QC people have a special role inthe development process. Part of this role is being involved in differentactivities throughout the entire development process. Starting from the timewhen requirements are gathered, when initial design is made, and until the endof each iteration, the QC people must observe and gather information about thesystem under development. This is crucial to the completeness and correctnessof the QC activity. A QC Engineer can’t be expected to jump into the projectjust before the actual testing starts. She must be aware of the evolution ofthe requirements and the system itself (including the way it is designed andimplemented) in order to create an effective test plan, and build correcttests.

However, at the same time, it iscrucial to maintain the objectivity of the QC people. Since the QC engineer isso involved in the development process, it is easy to forget that if she willbe too close to the developers, the result of the QC process might not reflectthe real quality of the product.

If, for example, something in therequirements is vague, the QC engineer might be tempted to ask the developerfor the “correct interpretation” of this issue. But, it is the QC engineer’srole to verify that the developer’s interpretation of the requirements iscorrect. How can she use the developer’s interpretation to build an objectivetest?

This is a simple example for whatcould happen when QC and developers are too close. Doing extensive testingbased on what the developers gathered from the requirements, is bound to catchonly coding errors. Logical errors in the functionality of the system are mostlikely to be left in the code under these circumstances.

The way to solve this conflict, ishaving great self discipline. QC people should be involved in the development,but they should think twice about whom are they talking to when havingquestions about the requirements of the product. The best person to ask suchquestions is the same person defining the requirements.

Itis important to note that the QC people should not be completely isolated fromthe development team. The QC engineer could benefit a great deal fromdiscussing the structure of the code and the design details with thedevelopers. This kind of discussion might give her ideas for more test cases,for example. The difference between discussing the structure of the code anddiscussing the interpretation of the requirements is that verifying the latteris in fact the purpose of the QC process.

Theodore Ts'o offered an insightful summary of issues affecting future development on the ext3 filesystem, "it is clear that many people feel they have a stake in the future development plans of the ext2/ext3 filesystem, as it [is] one of the most popular and commonly used filesystems, particular amongst the kernel development community. For this reason, the stakes are higher than it would be for other filesystems." He listed the three main concerns for future development as stability, compatibility confusion, and code complexity, "unfortunately, these various concerns were sometimes mixed together in the discussion two months ago, and so it was hard to make progress. Linus's concern seems to have been primarily the first point, with perhaps a minor consideration of the 3rd. Others dwelled very heavily on the second point."

Theodore went on to say, "to address these issues, after discussing the matter amongst ourselves, the ext2/3 developers would like to propose the following path forward." He listed a four step plan beginning with the creation of a new ext4 filesystem registered with the kernel temporarily as 'ext3dev', "this will be explicitly marked as an CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL filesystem, and will in affect be a 'development fork' of ext3. A similar split of the fs/jbd will be made in order to support 64-bit jbd, which will be used by fs/ext4 and future versions of ocfs2." Theodore explained that new features will go into the ext3dev tree, with only bugfixes making their way back to the stable ext3 tree. He noted that it will remain important that the ext4 code base can mount ext3 filesystems, "this is necessary to ensure a future smooth upgrade path from ext3 to ext4 users." Finally, "probably in 6-9 months when we are satisified with the set of features that have been added to fs/ext4, and confident that the filesystem format has stablized, we will submit a patch which causes the fs/ext4 code to register itself as the ext4 filesystem." He further noted that once ext4 is deemed fully stable, it may completely replace ext3 in the source tree.