Linus Tolke wrote:
> I have now created the wiki page 
> http://argouml.tigris.org/wiki/Test_Report_0.28 more or less after what 
> my vision of your mail Dave. Was it also what you were thinking?

This looks great.  I will work on this to improve it.  The main thing will be 
   to point beta testers to it, and I hope that it can be made fairly self 
explanatory.  We'll try it and see how it goes; if it doesn't work well, then 
it's no big loss.

>     2009/3/20 Tom Morris <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>         My personal opinion is that any approach based on manual testing,
>         particularly manual testing by developers, is doomed to failure.
> 
>         The way to get adequate human coverage is to have a large user
>         population and to engage them effectively in beta testing.  You
>         don't
>         need 100% coverage.  If users aren't using something, it doesn't
>         matter whether it works or not.

This is making one big assumption that feature value is proportional to 
frequency of use.  This is not always the case, imagine the 'Nuclear Reactor 
Emergency Shutdown' feature, or the driver airbag in a car!  I'm being silly, 
but I do think that there will be some ArgoUML features that are not used 
much, yet are pivotal to some particular users.

For example, the loading up of models saved with old versions of ArgoUML. 
Most users probably won't test this much, but if you are a user with an 
archive of lots of old models which need to be viewed from time to time, then 
it will be very important to you.  Some features can be tested automatically, 
others are very hard.  Does an old file *look* right after it is loaded?  The 
model may be right, but is it legible on the screen?  This is not so easy to 
test automatically.

I think we are in agreement that lots of testing (automatic or manual) is 
good, and getting users to do beta testing is worthwhile.  While we don't 
have any incentives for beta testers, I think the most we can realistically 
expect for the average beta tester is that they will play with the beta 
versions, and possibly use them for their day to day work.

The wiki list will hopefully give those beta testers who want to go a little 
further, some guidance on what sort of things they might want to test.  It 
could be used as a focus point to help users shorten beta periods if they 
want to see new releases more quickly.  It might even provide an easy way for 
some people just to get involved that little bit more, which is a good thing 
considering our general lack of resource.

We'll see how it goes.

Dave

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