Lost in the dark: Quality and consistency with Symbian Signed

2008-05-27T11:36:53+03:00

This is my first blog even after being in the community for a long time. There has been a buzz in the air right from the entry of Symbian signed(mandatory one). I have always supported its existence and its benefits because in nature it is nice idea to get good quality applications while preventing malwares application from the market.

Everything is all set. Sales team is trying hard to get good lead from the market. Once the lead is finalized, managers are working hard to allocate resources, time lines, developers, etc... Then developers come into picture. Developers know that if anything goes wrong then they are the people who will be interrogated for the failure reasons. So apparently they are the key persons who transforms the virtual idea in the existence and eventually they work hard to achieve this. Finally Quality Assurance comes into scene to investigate bugs in the application developed by developers. QA tries to cope up with the frequently changing test criteria from Symbian Signed. But no worries, they accept the truth and without complaining anything they just do their job. Perhaps they want to achieve dynamic virtue in their life as like dynamic test criteria. There is a say that QA and developers cannot be good friends, one wants to reveal bugs even if it is minor one whereas one doesn't want to see any bug. Application goes back and forth between them. And finally green signal comes from QA and application is ready for submission to "Certified" Test House governed by Symbian signed. Everyone is happy "so far".

General consideration for choosing "Certified" test house is the availability and immediate follow up. From aspects of quality and competency all the test house should be same. After considering all these aspects, a test house is selected to get application symbian signed. Everything is so good so far. Application is scheduled for testing by "Certified" test house. All of a sudden you get a reply from "Certified" test house that your application is failed. You are shocked but then you find Test report and you find test cases which are marked as "failed". You take a deep look into those failed cases and words come from your mouth without any efforts, "Hey, what the hack!!! They cannot fail application for theses causes". Eventually your counter action would be to ask about these failures to "Certified" test house. And after few hours/day you get a reply from them "Yes, this should not cause the failure", "Thanks for confirming, we will remove this", "We are able to reproduce it but if you are not able to reproduce then we will remove this", "You have to submit waivers for this" etc... So where is consistency? Where is Quality?

After fixing bugs, you are all set with so called "waivers" to submit your application again. You are more confident this time. Your customer is forcing you to deliver application to them as soon as possible and you are confined with the "deadline". You lost your weight and nights become nightmares. Finally you send your application again to "Certified" test house. But eventually you get reply that "Waivers are not accepted". Ok, but why? Please provide complete results. There is no hard feelings but please let us know the reasons for not accepting waivers. No reply..... wait....No reply.

Whom to ask? Why there is so much coupling in whole process? Are these "Certified" test house really "Certified"? Are they competent enough? Is there any quality inspection carried out by any neutral third party?

I am not against with Symbian Signing process but there should be transparent process. If you are expecting quality from application then there must be quality process in the Symbian Signed Test houses.

Finally i would say that Symbian signed criteria should not be that much stringent that prevents developers to program on Symbian OS. They should be motivated in nature rather than discouraging. Support from Test house should be friendly and even they should guide in getting your application signed.

Again, whom to ask? You are lost in the dark.

Kiran.

Kiran Patel's Forum Nokia Blog

Lost in the dark: Quality and consistency with Symbian Signed