SpikeSource has announced their Open Source TestFest, “to help increase the participatory testing of open source software.”
Project teams will compete under one of the qualified projects* selected by SpikeSource as co-sponsors of the SpikeSource Open Testing Contest. Projects will be grouped into three “weight-classes” as determined by lines of code. Each weight class will be eligible for one Gold Spike Award and one Silver Spike Award.
As I’ve noted in an earlier post, testing seems to me to be an increasingly important part of the open source software ecosystem. In order for independently developed open source projects to be assembled into stable application stacks, open source either needs to stop innovating and slow down (not likely), be integrated into a single stable corporate distribution, or we need new competencies that address the combinatorial challenge of integrating the latest and greatest from thousands of independent developers.