2005 Zimbra Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

Zimbra Architecture, Page 20 of 33

users (via forums), as well as to open their development, build and test

regimen. By inviting users into the sausage factory , open source is at least

welcoming greater participation and feedback on quality.

 

Developers and administrators that are interested in participating in the

Zimbra Community can join via www.zimbra.com/community/

, which includes

access to the Zimbra bug and enhancement database, forums, collaborative

Wiki (for documentation, localization to other languages, etc.), Zimlet and

skins gallery, and so on.

 

"    Continuous quality assurance (QA) Most open source software is developed

in public in that new code for the project is typically posted to the Internet

daily or weekly. The fact that community members (as well as anyone else with

an Internet connection) can download and use this forward-development code

demands a higher-level of automated QA on the nightly and weekly builds. In

this way, quality assurance is built into the development process rather than

left to the end of the new feature coding cycle.

 

The Zimbra QA regimen is founded upon comprehensive automated testing of

both the ZCS client and server applied to each ZCS build. The client-side QA

regimen uses scripting in Mercury QTP to simulate and validate most every

human interaction with the Zimbra Ajax client across browsers. For the server-

side, Zimbra has developed a test fixture called Soapgen that can simulate

tens-of-thousands of concurrent users performing virtually every operation on

their mailbox. Soapgen is a Java-based client application that relies on the

mapping from user actions to the XML/SOAP calls that would be made by the

ZCS Ajax client (as well as the synchronization calls from, for example, the ZCS

MAPI provider for Outlook) to the server. Some of these tests focus on

individual operation correctness, while others focus on aggregate performance,

scalability, and fault tolerance.

 

"    Intellectual property (IP) hygiene Most software (both open source and

proprietary) is now built from existing components. There is arguably now less

risk of IP contamination (that is, does your vendor own the IP rights to the

software they are giving you?) with open source than with closed source

alternatives, because all such open source dependencies are transparent.

 

We at Zimbra are zealots about protecting the IP cleanliness of the Zimbra

code base. We are very careful about incorporating third-party contributions

and technologies (generally using only state-of-the-art open source projects

with compatible licensing). Moreover, we require IP assignment before we

incorporate any potential contributions from the community within the ZCS

code base. (This is increasingly common practice for open source organizations

like Apache and the Free Software Foundation, as well as companies like

Zimbra.) Together these policies protect the Zimbra community and end-users

from any hidden dependency on encumbered IP.

 

"    Community QA Last and most importantly, successful open source projects

are able to draw large developer and testing communities for more

economically than proprietary vendors can. (It is after all a trade open source