Moodlerooms

Moodle's Testing Process:

1. Roadmap – Based on input from thousands of instructors and developers, a roadmap is created detailing the vision of Moodle. Developers around the world follow coding guidelines and contribute work to help create the next version of Moodle. At this stage, a development version is released for developers to use as a basis for work they contribute to the new version.

2. Beta/User Acceptance Testing – After code has been developed, a beta version is packaged and released. Moodle community members use the beta version and provide feedback via the Moodle Tracker. Bug fixes are then developed and applied to address issues that have been discovered and submitted to the Tracker during this period.

3. Release – After the code passes all testing and all known issues have been addressed, the stable version of the code is packaged and released. This stable version is updated and reviewed weekly. Older stable builds also remain available on Moodle.org in case an organization needs to revert to a previous version for any reason. Each new release comes with:

• Release notes (Highlights, Security issues, Known problems and API changes)
• Bug fixes and improvements
• Known bugs and issues

Quality Control – Moodle testers and core developers continuously perform quality control. Issue tracking is an important part of this process, which involves reporting of problems (bugs), ideas for improvement and new features. Moodle issue reporting and tracking information is documented and openly available to everyone, strengthening the efforts of ensuring a quality system. Moodle's issue tracking system, called the Tracker, allows all Moodle participants to create, view, comment on, vote, and watch bugs. Moodle's Quality Control process also includes a weekly code review to catch any new bugs that might have been created while fixing old ones.

After Moodle has released code, Moodlerooms then applies its own testing process (as detailed on the right). Any code updates to Moodlerooms need to pass through all rounds of testing before they are placed on the production servers.

More Information

Moodlerooms' Testing Process

Our learning management platform is a continuously evolving technology. Moodlerooms regularly integrates new code to add useful features or application upgrades. However, whether the code is developed by Moodlerooms, Moodle, third-party developers or client developers, we apply a rigorous testing process before integrating any code with our platform.

All code needs to pass three types of testing before being integrated with the Moodlerooms production servers, at which point it will be tested a final time:

1. Review Stage – Moodlerooms performs a complete review of every line of new code for any flaws or issues (such as non-patched hacks or excessive SQL queries that could be replaced with leaner ones). The ZEND Platform (a robust tool for testing, monitoring and increasing the performance of PHP sites) shows errors down to a specific line of code, greatly enhancing our response time and accuracy in fixing issues.
2. Unit and Use Testing Stage – Moodlerooms performs dedicated manual user testing in all use cases to assure each function of the tool works correctly without causing any problems with the rest of the platform functionality. After passing two rounds of manual testing, the code is ready to be placed on our testing environment for stress tests.
3. Beta Testing Stage – Moodlerooms installs all code on a test build within the same clustered server environment on which our client installations reside. We then use ZEND Platform and Tsung Load Testing applications to stress the system. Through a series of reports from ZEND Platform, an administrator is able to find any bottlenecks or performance issues. Tsung Load Testing Tool allows Moodlerooms to quickly and accurately ensure that the new version of our codebase is ready for use on our production servers by reporting any bottlenecks that may occur during a simulation of real-life uses.
4. Integration Stage – If the code is deemed safe for addition to production environment, Moodlerooms integrates the code with our platform.
5. Production Testing Stage – Once the tested code has been integrated with our platform, we perform additional sanity testing to ensure the integration of the code has not caused any issues within the production environment.