[maemo-developers] Extras QA checklist

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Kamen Bundev wrote:
 > On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Andrew Flegg
 >> * MUST NOT waste battery life when in background or in "normal" use.
 >
 > What about applications that can't control what they are showing
 > and such that shouldn't be suspended when in background?

They don't belong to a battery powered mobile device.


There are very few valid application use-cases for waking up on
the background:
- downloading data user has requested
- playing music (or other audio)
- tracking a route

However, even while doing these, application should never update its
window when on background as window updates are a much heavier operation
and can slow down the foreground application noticeably[1].

This is easy to test with xresponse from the SDK tools repository, just
do in SSH console:
	xresponse -w '0' -a '*'

And see whether it reports anything when the app is on background.

To check for wakeups in general, one can do this in console:
	strace -f -p <application PID>


E.g. Games should automatically pause when they go to background
for obvious usability reasons, not just because of battery consumption.


ext Graham Cobb wrote:
> On Wednesday 28 October 2009 18:28:24 Antti Vähä-Sipilä wrote:
>>>  * MUST NOT introduce security risks.
>> I'd rephrase "MUST NOT contain known security vulnerabilities" and

So a release that fixes only some of the issues won't get promoted
until all (known) issues are fixed (and potentially new unknown ones
added)?

I would rephrase this as "MUST NOT introduce (additional) security
risks."


Then one thing missing from the QA checklist completely is checking
for resource leakage.  A leaky home applet can slow down home a lot
and the caused increased swapping probably slows also rest of the device
to some extent.

Any tested application should be used for couple of days to see
that it doesn't cause problems for the device.


	- Eero

[1] For example popular gPodder application is buggy because it
apparently listens to orientation changes when it's not visible and
does e.g. lots of operations when user tries to answer a call.