I guess we are all for improved usability? I am for sure and anxiously await the next Drupal releases.
But recently, I have come to the conclusion that most systems and CMS seem to suffer from the lack of Quality Measurements and Ratings metrics.
Call it Quality Measurements or Quality Control... Project Metrics... Ratings metrics... they are related.
(A few years ago at HP, we used to call this TQC - Total Quality Control)
I know that some Drupal developers have started a project about gathering statistics about running Drupal sites. Good.
If Drupal could include these Quality Measurements as well as Ratings , that would be "accessible" to all the users or administrators, it would be a great improvement.
Open Quality Measurements and Ratings... not hidden. Accessible.
Here is a similar proposal that includes the stats gathering part AND full quality rating via volunteers.
Open Quality Measurements and Ratings via Official Volunteer Testers
The statistics would be gathered straight from systems that have accepted to be "Official Volunteer Testers" for the whole community plus allowing them the ability to enter notes, appreciation, points, bugs and support requests directly. We thus avoid the issue of privacy with volunteer testers.
Part of the info would be released: like the number of installed modules, their names, the kind of environment, and anything related to the names of testers, domains or ip addresses could remain private if they wished. Only Drupal.org admins would have access to all the info if required.
It could also allow the developers access to a wealth of live information - anonymous or not if wished.
And the community (users, admins and developers) would have a much better knowledge on the kind of module that would be installed or updated. Users too. Something that would allow us admins or developers to know if a Module has passed standard tests before being released and success rates when installed in different environments.
Does the new release retain or improve functionalities? Or looses some? ***
Are the old bugs corrected? ***
On what kind of systems has it been tested (mysql, php, etc)? ***
On which Drupal release?
Are the release notes updated?
Which version is best? ***
etc.
*** = not always clear
I've just posted something along those lines in a discussion about the Update Status module
(another very good module by merlinofchaos and dww). http://drupal.org/node/124187#comment-259419
And DWW pointed me to related discussions and I found some more:
Collecting stats for Drupal community - http://drupal.org/node/128827
Project quality metrics system - http://groups.drupal.org/node/3314
Drupal Project Metrics - http://groups.drupal.org/node/5022
Peer Review facility for modules - http://drupal.org/node/139291
Project quality indicator: rating system - http://drupal.org/node/77976
Allow voting on issues - http://drupal.org/node/42232
My 2 cents...
What do you think?
Thanks for your continued great work!
