Introduction
Hello open source community! I’m Wasiq Bhamla, a Software Quality Assurance Engineer for more than 18 years and Open Source maintainer and contributor for almost a decade. I am passionate about building Testing tools and frameworks that empower the QA community.
After I complete my job time or on my days off from work, I dive straight in to work on my open source projects.
How did you get involved with Open Source?
It started in 2015 when I was given a task to automate Android and iOS applications. When I checked in my organization if there are any Test automation frameworks available in any other project teams, I found that there is none. So I created a Mobile Test automation framework, and thought to make it available for the world who might face similar challenges in using Appium directly by open sourcing that project.
Later on, whenever I face new challenges, I make sure to create a working simple and easy to use solution and make it open source on GitHub. In short, I started as the maintainer instead of a contributor.
However, there were times where I also contributed to other open source projects which I was using, but those contributions were very little. I mostly was involved with my personal frameworks and tools which I had created.
What’s Open Source to you?
For me, open source is a way to help the community of Quality assurance Engineers around the world with the common problems which I face by creating a useful solution for everyone which is very easy to use and maintain.
What projects are you involved in?
Let me share details about few of my projects which I am maintaining:
Boyka Framework
Ultimate Test automation framework for automation of Web, API, Android and iOS applications. This project was created to simplify and ease the Test automation process for the QA community. It was implemented by using all my 15+ years of experience and learnings so the problems which I faced, this framework would help me and all the QA’s overcome it.
Boyka CLI
Boyka Framework command line assistant. This project was created for further simplifying the process of creating new or configuring the existing Boyka Framework projects.
Multiple Cucumber HTML Reporter
Generate beautiful Cucumber HTML reports This project was created by another open source contributor named Wim Selles, who was looking for someone to adopt this awesome tool project. I had the privilege to take over the ownership of this project and become a new maintainer for the project.
Now it is nearing almost 1M downloads per month on NPM;
Maven Publish Action
Publish your Java JAR file to Maven Central with GitHub Actions. This project came into existence when the other Maven publish action which I was using, was not being maintained for almost a year.
I took the opportunity to completely rewrite the project in Typescript from the original Common JS. Now it is being actively maintained by me.
Main challenges as a maintainer?
The main challenge I have experienced as a maintainer, is lack of contributions. It becomes very hectic for me as a maintainer and core contributor to do each and every thing for my project, from adding new features to add documentations, updating readme, setting up the CI workflows, creating contents for the project to raise awareness for the projects. It sometimes causes burnout.
Another challenge is the lack of financial support for the open source projects. This however does not demotivate me, but it would really help in attracting new contributions which would highly boost the project’s productivity.
How can contributors support maintainers?
Contributors can contribute to any project by helping fix any open issues, fix any documentation typos, triage any issues, and also help answering to queries raised by other users. There are plenty of ways where contributors can be of help to the maintainers.
Anyone can become a contributor, they just need to support the projects which they are using in their daily work. All you need to do is look where you can contribute and support the maintainer. You can even reach out to the maintainers who will be very happy to guide you and help you get started.
Key security practices in your projects?
In all my projects, I have set up dependabot to automatically update the vulnerable dependencies. I also make sure I have enabled all the GitHub Security scanning which would alert me whenever there is any security issue in any of my projects. These features from GitHub also include scanning of any accidental commit of any secure and confidential keys.
Advice to maintainers?
My advice to maintainers, whether new or experienced, is to always keep up the good work you are doing. It does not matter if there are times where you work for free, tirelessly and put in your extra precious hours, the thing that matters is what impact your project is having in your community.
Read stories shared by other maintainers.
This story was published under CC BY-SA by the author.