We really can't speak of
kaizen for such a small project that only develops from by small strokes twice a year, but to take into account users' feedback I've started trying new tools to improve
Yapsy's quality and make interactions with users a little smoother:
- for a few months now, the sources (originally in a mercurial repository on sourceforge) have been maintained in sync with a github repository. This should simplify the process of improvement proposals from the contributors, many of whom seem to like github a lot and will now be able to do pull requests.
- since the latest release, yapsy is also linked to the continuous integration service Travis CI so that each new commit triggers a full run of all unit-tests.
Now for those that may be interested the following are my impressions about these tools.
Concerning github it's clear that the design is really great and the user experience well thought out. It's a another proof, after the success of MacOSX with the development community, against the idea that tools for the technical crowd don't need UX refinements as much as tools for the rest of us. The other similarity with MacOSX is unfortunately that it still seems odd to develop free software on a proprietary platform...
About Travis the service works really well, makes it possible and easy to test Python libraries (but not only) on several versions of Python (which is quite important for yapsy that supports Python from v2.3 to 3.2), and it's free and open source. It's also a one-click set up for projects on ... github (but if anybody has tips on how to do that directly with sourceforge, I'm interested !).
