I think we're in general agreement about getting community involvement
in QA along the lines that Alec and Aparna have outlined below.
Perhaps the questions before us are:
- why don't we have more qa community involvement now?
- is there something that we can do now to get more community help with qa?
The answer to the first one might be as simple as lack of usable
functionality. Even so, it might be worth discussing whether or not
there are other things we could do differently to get more participation.
Could we frame a goal that was more specific than "get more qa help"?
Cheers,
Katie
Aparna Kadakia wrote:
Alec,
At the end of 0.6 release we created a community QA page that's linked
from Chandler's 'Get Involved
<http://chandler.osafoundation.org/getinvolved.php>' page and it pretty
much covers all the items you have below. Check this out:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/CommunityQA
We have broken down items for non-coders as well as coders. I agree we
could use as much help from people just trying out features in Chandler
manually as we could with automated tests. Automated tests are meant to
help in the long run in terms of regression testing etc but it can never
completely offset the number of bugs human interaction can find visually.
Aparna
Alec Flett wrote:
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.
Here's a few to get things started:
* Start a community project to write import/export converters for
popular file formats
* Change the Chandler build so that we can get Chandler distributed
by the various Linux distributions
Ted
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