We're very excited to announce the launch of ReviewDriven -- a distributed quality assurance (QA) platform.

ReviewDriven is a scalable platform built atop Amazon Web Services to bring QA tools to all development shops and site owners. ReviewDriven leverages the latest in Drupal 7 technology. This initial release provides all interested parties with an enhanced version of the features of qa.drupal.org (Drupal core's quality assurance platform), adapted for use with any development group.

ReviewDriven is designed from the ground up to be incredibly simple to setup without compromising customizability. It allows for big and small projects, simple and complicated projects, single projects and groups of projects, each with various workflows and scheduling needs.

The primary architect of ReviewDriven is Jimmy Berry (aka "boombatower"), the developer of qa.drupal.org, and the principal architect of Drupal's Testing Framework which revolutionized the Drupal core development cycle (as mentioned by Dries in recent keynote addresses and other community members such as below).

Testing.drupal.org [now qa.drupal.org] went live in October 2008, and once again, Drupal's development process was reveolutionized. Now, developers don't need to sit through a test run (which could take 30 minutes or more) in order to verify their changes are working; they can simply upload their changes and be informed by one of the testing clients.Angie "webchick" Byron

The ReviewDriven platform is a third generation architecture, built from the ground up to take advantage of Drupal 7 core and contributed modules. The platform incorporates lessons learned from building the automated testing framework for Drupal core, and from working with enterprise organizations with remote development environments.

Initially, ReviewDriven supports PHP syntax checking, Coder reviews, and Drupal tests. Drupal tests may be run against a scratch site using a vanilla database (i.e., standard unit or functional tests of code), or against a remote site (i.e., site configuration).

Features

The automated platform allows developers to do commit or patch-based testing of code (as drupal.org), and assures site owners a live site operates in accordance with its design.

• a clean, intuitive interface to define and organize reviews
• a dashboard to quickly determine the status of your account
• summary displays
• drill-down displays with details for developers
• history of review results
• a scalable platform
• like other cloud applications, provides ease of setup, low maintanance, and software updates
• build projects using version control systems
• utilize Drush Make
• exposes an API to create and trigger jobs

Future plans

For the initial release, we focused our efforts on the features we considered to be most useful to the largest audience. As a taste of things to come:

• notifications -- email, IRC, service call on specific events
• code coverage -- determine level of test coverage and highlight areas needing improvement
• additional users -- related to the primary account with fine-grained permissions (e.g., developer, manager)
• graphs -- to visualize trends (e.g., improvements or regressions)
• demo sites -- build a site instance on demand for demonstration or visual inspection (e.g., to demo any patch or module on drupal.org)
• enhanced code reviews -- to increase accuracy, eliminate false positives, and enable additional reviews
• alternative environments -- such as Java and Python (make a suggestion)

How to get started

• Register an account
• Watch the video
• Read the getting started documentation
• Join the community and let us know what you think
• Follow us on identica and twitter

Tags: Planet Drupal