Quality Assurance
 

I’m currently researching different operation systems which I want to use in a customer product. This product will consist of a slimmed down PC, the OS and the essence of the product, the proprietary SW which is currently being designed. I want to make it clear that our delivery is not just the proprietary SW, but the entire system as a whole, HW and SW.

The powers that be (QA) have already set forth quite a rigorous SW validation plan. This is fine from the stand point of our proprietary SW but since the product is being delivery as a whole, the OS also must meet some level of their SW validation plan.

My Question: Where can I learn more about the design control processes and testing practices used when releasing another Mandrake distro? Or more specifically, is their a design control process generally followed by all of the contributors to open source SW. You can image the pickle that I’m in and the other OS options do not make these questions any easier. Are there other forums or sites that could help me answers these questions?

I am a bit new to the open source community and GPL, but I would expect that Mandrake would go through some level of validation when it comes to their proprietary SW and 3rd party SW before including it in a new distro and make this info, however general it may be, available to their customers, correct? Same question applies to the 3rd party SW in any distro, Mandrake or not.

Is this forum inappropriate for this type of message and should I contact Mandrake directly?

There's no one design process. Every project is different. You can read developer lists for many project and see details. Usually the main part of testing is releasing alpha, beta and rc (release candidate) versions and then fix bugs found by users.
How it is in Mandrake, I don't know. You'd probebly need to contact them.

Mandrake recently changed their release process to provide extra time for external QA testing. The terminology is a little convoluted IMHO, instead of alpha (internal/staging tests), beta (external/live tests) and gamma (release), they now have alpha, beta (aka "cooker"), community release and stable. It's similar to the process FreeBSD and some other Linux distros use (having a "stable" branch, that is.) Anyway, more info can be found here: http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/.../products/2453

Good luck with your turn-key system... not that luck has anything to do with it. ;)