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I have a very quick-entry-point goal: More QA. In my experience, this is the easiest way for new contributors to get involved in an end-user product - mostly because it means that contributors don't have to be coders, and because the granularity of the work is very small. I know people are constantly going on about how we need more automated tests but end-user apps also need a healthy amount of human interaction to find things that automated tests are never going to find (unless we stop developing chandler altogether and just write tests for 6 months) ... i.e. it takes a human to notice than when you drag a calendar event into a saturday, that the minicalendar turns blue or that the "sync" button gets disabled when you stamp an event as an e-mail, then a task, and then unstamp it as an e-mail. (don't worry, none of this really happens!) Further, there are lots of very helpful things that QA contributors can do within the bug system, beyond simply filing bugs. 1) manage dupes: finding dupes of existing bugs is very valuable, especially as the number of people filing bugs goes up. This usually means people looking at bugs that have been filed in the last day or so, and looking for existing dupes - this is really an art and when done well its rather amazing. 2) help narrow down bugs filed by other reports - this involves taking existing bugs that may not be well defined, and narrowing their scope to exactly what the problem is. Maybe it turns out that the minical only turns blue when you're dragging all day events that start before the present date? This might involve just asking the reporter for more details, or it may involve trying to reproduce the bug. 3) platform testing - taking bugs that were reported on Mac but seem to be cross platform, trying them on Linux, and reporting results in the bug. I'm sure there are many other helpful things that I'm not thinking of but these are the ones that spring to mind. Its rather amazing on the mozilla project the way you can file a duplicate bug and it gets marked as a duplicate within 2 hours! Alec Ted Leung wrote: As part of the planning for Chandler 0.7, I would like to set some community goals. Please reply to this message if you have ideas for things that you'd like to see happen or things you think we ought to try. |
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