As a QA tester, this blog post at O’Reilly’s Radar is interesting:
Remarking on new companies like Spikesource and SourceLabs, he said: “It seems to me that the tester rather than the coder is becoming the new hero of the open source community.”
I think he’s onto something.
Hmm… if both designers and testers are the new heroes, is this further evidence of my oft-argued “open source paradigm shift”, where open source is leading to the commodification of many forms of infrastructure software, making testing and integration more important as an industry competency. Meanwhile, the new web applications “up the stack” are driven by a whole new class of “infoware design patterns”.
The decentralized nature of Open Source demands a need for rigorous, process-based testing of software before businesses can be expected to adopt it as part of their infrastructure.