I am happy to announce that our team is steadily growing! As we work through our roadmap, status update here, and on-board new team members I start to feel the need for a bit more structure and organization behind the scenes. I also wish for consistent contributions to the project (commit early, commit often) so I can better estimate the resources that we have!

I am also actively discussing Kiwi TCMS with lots of people at various conferences and generate many ideas for the future. The latest SEETEST in Belgrade was particularly fruitful. Some of these ideas are pulling into different directions and I need help to keep them under control!

Development-wise sometimes I lose track of what's going on and who's doing what between working on Kiwi TCMS, preparing for conferences and venues to promote the project, doing code review of other team members, trying not to forget to check-in on progress (especially by interns), recruiting fresh blood and thinking about the overall future of the project. Our user base is growing and there are days where I feel like everything is happening at once or that something needs to be implemented ASAP (which is usually true anyway)!

Meet Rayna Stankova in the role of our team coach! Reny is a director for Women Who Code Sofia, senior QA engineer at VMware, mentor with CoderDojo Bulgaria and a long-time friend of mine. Although she is an experienced QA in her own right she will be contributing to the people side of Kiwi TCMS and less so technically!

Her working areas will be planning and organization:

• help us (re)define the project vision and goals
• work with us on roadmaps and action plans so we can meet the project goals faster
• help us (self) organize so that we are more efficient, including checking progress and blockers (aka enforcer) and meet the aforementioned consistency point
• serve as our professional coach, motivator and somebody who will take care of team health (yes I really suck at motivating others)

and generally serving as another very experienced member of the team!

We did a quick brainstorming yesterday and started to produce results (#smileyface)! We do have a team docs space to share information (non-public for now, will open it gradually as we grow) and came up with the idea to use Kiwi TCMS as a check-list for our on-boarding/internship process!

I don't know how it will play out but I do expect from the team to self-improve, be inspired, become more focused and more productive! All of this also applies to myself, even more so!

Existing team members progress

Last year we started with 2 existing team members (Tony and myself) and 3 new interns (Ivo, Kaloyan and Tseko) who built this website!

Tony is the #4 contributor to Kiwi TCMS in terms of number of commits and is on track to surpass one of the original authors (before Kiwi TCMS was forked)! He's been working mostly on internal refactoring and resolving the thousands of pylint errors that we had (down to around 500 I think). This summer Tony and I visited the OSCAL conference in Tirana and hosted an info booth for the project.

Ivo is the #5 contributor in terms of numbers of commits. He did learn very quickly and is working on getting rid of the remaining pylint errors. His ability to adapt and learn is quite impressive actually. Last month he co-hosted a git workshop at HackConf, a 1000+ people IT event in Sofia.

Kaloyan did most of the work on our website initially (IIRC). Now he is studying in the Netherlands and not active on the project. We are working to reboot his on-boarding and I'm hoping he will find the time to contribute to Kiwi TCMS regularly.

From the starting team only Tseko decided to move on to other ventures after he contributed to the website.

Internship program

At Kiwi TCMS we have a set of training programs that teach all the necessary technical skills before we let anyone actively work on the project, let alone become a team member.

Our new interns are Denitsa Uzunova and Desislava Koleva. Both of them are coming from Vratsa Software Community and were mentors at the recently held CodeWeek hackathon in their home city! I wish them fast learning and good luck!

Happy testing!

We are happy to announce that OpenFest - the biggest open source conference in Bulgaria has provided an info booth for our project. This year the event will be held on 3rd and 4th of November at Sofia Tech Park!

Last time the team went to a conference together we had a lot of fun! Join us at OpenFest to learn more about Kiwi TCMS and have fun with us!

#KiwiTCMS is at #hackconf #HC18. Find @atodorov_ and @ivo0926 if you want to talk #opensource #test case management! pic.twitter.com/ioRCnds7jY

— Kiwi TCMS (@KiwiTcms) September 15, 2018

@KiwiTcms at @HackConf_ day 2. Find me or @atodorov_ if you want to talk about open source test case management system #opensource #tcms #kiwitcms pic.twitter.com/OGsj0Z9Dww

— Anton Sankov (@a_sankov) September 16, 2018

In case you are unable to visit Sofia, which you totally should, you can catch up with us in Russia until the end of the year:

• PiterPy, 2nd-3rd November, St. Petersburg - where Alex Todorov will talk about pylint plugins and how we use them inside Kiwi TCMS
• Heisenbug, 6th-7th December, Moscow - where Alex will talk about tools and methods that we use to make Kiwi TCMS more secure

Feel free to ping us at @KiwiTCMS or look for the kiwi bird logo and come to say hi. Happy testing!

Hello everyone, in this article I will outline the progress that the Kiwi TCMS team has made towards achieving the goals on our roadmap.

Make code easier to maintain

Status: moderate progress

Initially CodeClimate reported a "D" rating with a 1 year estimated effort. Now it is still on "D" rating with a 7 months estimated effort to bring the project back in shape. Code smells have dropped from 600+ to 418, duplications have been reduced from 600+ to 359! At the same time technical debt ratio has been decreased from 32,5% to 21,6% and little over 10000 lines of code have been removed from the source code. Checkout the stats for more info!

Use pylint and pylint-django

Status: good progress

Both pylint and pylint-django have been integrated into our CI workflow. There are even a few custom built plugins that we use. The number of issues reported is down to around 900 from 4000+ initially. The cleanup has been lead by Anton Sankov with help from Ivaylo Ivanov and myself.

Render HTML, return JSON

Status: no progress

Several views were probably modified to return pure JSON in the meantime but we've not done any targeted work to resolve this issue.

Submit forms, post JSON, GET clean URLs

Status: no progress

Same as above, not much has been done in this area.

API layer

Status: complete

After Kiwi TCMS v4.0 the server side API has been reorganized and updated to follow the model/method names used internally.

After the recent version 5.0 the client side API library has been stripped to its most basic form so that you can work directly with the responses from the server.

There is no more duplication and ambiguity in names because there isn't a lot of code left!

Documentation

Status: moderate progress, dropped

All RPC methods have been documented! The rest of the internals will be documented as we go along.

No vendored JavaScript libraries

Status: moderate progress

Several JavaScript libraries have been removed but we still carry around jQuery and Handlebars.js. No work has been done to convert Kiwi TCMS to use the jQuery version provided with Django.

Less HTML templates with better organization

Status: minimal progress

There are still over 100 HTML templates in Kiwi TCMS. Some of the HTML templates have been merged together, some email templates have been refactored and marked as translatable but the majority of them have not been updated for a long time.

Modern interface with Patternfly

Status: no progress

JavaScript updates and front-end testing

Status: small progress

A number of JavaScript functions have been refactored and removed during the past few releases but there are still thousands of lines of code left to deal with.

Community efforts

Status: moderate progress

We are seeing a steady stream of new users registered on https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org and there are several active contributors (issues, translations).

Kiwi TCMS was represented at OSCAL Tirana, DjangoCon Heidelberg and PyCon Prague! We're planning to attend HackConf and OpenFest in Sofia by the end of the year.

Happy testing!

Kiwi TCMS is going on a small conference tour. This is where you can find us in the next couple of months:

• Bulgaria Web Summit - 14 April, Sofia
• OSCAL - 19 & 20 May, Tirana
• DjangoCon Europe - 23-27 May, Heidelberg

For all of the 3 conferences we're going to have a project presence. In addition to that you can catch-up with Alex Todorov, Kiwi's project lead at: TestCon Moscow(17-19 April, Moscow), Romanian Testing Conference(9-11 May, Cluj-Napoca), PyCon CZ(1-3 June, Prague) and DEVit(10-11 June, Thessaloniki).

If you can ping us at @KiwiTCMS or look for the kiwi bird logo and come to say hi!

Hello everyone. As you know Kiwi TCMS has been around for a while and it has gone through some big changes in the last year! It started as an abandoned Django 1.6 project with broken test suite and is now currently running on the latest Django 2.0.1 with Python 3.5! It is clearly a legacy code base!

We, the Kiwi TCMS team, have learned a lot more about the project and this blog post describes our roadmap for 2018 in terms of technical work and community engagement. The general technical direction is cleaner/simpler code, improved UI/UX and more tests!

Make code easier to maintain

The current code is a bunch of very large modules and functions and classes bundled together. It is also old and sometimes looks like spaghetti code. CodeClimate gives us a "D" rating for maintainability with a 1 year estimated effort to fix that. There are 600+ code smells and 600+ duplications detected by CodeClimate. Our goal is to get this number down to zero!

Use pylint and pylint-django

pylint is the standard static analyzer for Python and currently it reports over 4000 errors and warnings when executed against Kiwi TCMS. This is a huge number and it needs to become zero! We've also identified interesting patterns that will make it into pylint and pylint-django plugins!

Render HTML, return JSON

The current state of affairs is a mix and match of everything. There are views that render HTML, others which return pure JSON, other which return HTML encoded as JSON string and probably everything in between. Views that render pages need to do just that and views that are used with AJAX calls from the UI need to return pure JSON! A lot of these are hiding in plain sight and will come to light when we start overhauling the user interface.

Submit forms, post JSON, GET clean URLs

There are lots of forms in Kiwi TCMS. Sometimes they are submitted by the user and other times they are serialized and POSTed by some JavaScript code. This isn't very easy to understand plus this entire home-grown utility code doesn't bring anything useful to the project. All of these need to be identified and cleaned up. JavaScript code needs to send or consume JSON, nothing else!

There are also lots of places where Kiwi issues GET requests with a number of query parameters. Our goal is to minimize these and where possible have the parameters as part of the Django urls scheme, not as query strings.

API layer

The current API module is a bit disorganized. API namespaces don't match the names of the underlying DB models and the API client classes don't match any of the other two! The way we pass parameters and what these parameters are named should match between the client, the RPC method and the underlying model!

In earlier releases we've removed duplicate or similar RPC methods and we think there are more of these that need our love.

Documentation

We've started producing documentation from doc-strings and most of the RPC methods have such. However it is unformatted and barely readable, sometimes even inaccurate. Previous releases made progress on this but there's a lot more to cover.

All RPC methods should be documented first and then the rest of Kiwi's internals to make development easier!

No vendored JavaScript libraries

There are 11 vendored-in JavaScript files that we carry around in Kiwi TCMS. Most notable are jQuery plus a few addons and Handlebars.js. To the extent possible our goal is to use jQuery provided by Django or installed via NPM dependencies!

Less HTML templates with better organization

There are over 100 HTML templates in Kiwi TCMS. There are also email and even JavaScript templates. For example there are get_cases.html and get_review_cases.html which are essentially the same. This is kind of also true for templates used in new and edit views! Such templates should be unified!

Those JavaScript templates need to be totally gone!

All templates are stuffed together in a single directory and their names are not very predictable. They need to be split per application and follow some kind of naming convention.

Modern interface with Patternfly

The UI already uses the Patternfly library for some of its widgets. Most notably the main navigation header. Our goal is for the entire UI to be ported to Patternfly by updating widgets HTML and CSS where needed. This will also help clean things up a lot. At the same time we'll be rethinking how information is organized on screen and how the person interacts with it! Usability suggestions are very welcome!

This move will also help us get rid of the Handlebars dependency which is now used for pop-up dialogs.

JavaScript updates and front-end testing

There's lots of JavaScript code on the front-end and honestly we don't quite know what it does or how it is organized. There are also no tests on the front-end whatsoever!

It is our goal for this to change with the intention to not overdo the JavaScript part and keep things very minimal. At the moment we're thinking about vanilla jQuery that will act as a proxy between the browser and the back-end!

Community efforts

A year ago hardly anybody knew what Kiwi TCMS was, the project didn't even have this name, there was 1 active contributor and hardly any users! Now the community has started to slowly revitalize, we're seeing some contributions from our junior team members (more on this in another blog post) and also seeing folks installing and using Kiwi TCMS and reporting interesting bugs and feature requests around it!

For the upcoming year our goal is to seek active engagement with other open source projects that could make use of Kiwi TCMS and work with them. Kudos to openSUSE for being the first to propose such integration! We're also planning couple of appearances at a few conferences but there's nothing confirmed yet.

Every other contribution in terms of bug reports, new users and feature requests is of course welcome but we're very conscious of the fact that there's tons of work to be done and the team is still very small!

Team wise we'd like to get the existing team members up to speed and tackle the above tasks with priority. This will also help us introduce bug fixes and new features more quickly!

Happy testing!