I'll be honest that I don't have time to do direct side-by-side
comparisons or use a canonical set of test data (I've got too much real
book-keeping to do...). But I'm more than happy to check out a new
version every couple of weeks, and use it and report back. Obviously,
there are parts of the program that I don't use, or rarely use, but I do
regularly use a/r and a/p, many different reports, and .qif imports
and maintain three different data files with transaction counts from 30
or so a month to upto say 250 a month. So my question is, what version
would you like some testing on, and when should I start? Can you make an
announcement on -user that such-and-such version is ready for pre-alpha
testing, buyer beware ;), and then some of us can jump in?
I think, and hope you realise, that you guys have a fantastic program
and the users are very loyal and more than willing to help out to the
extent they can and I suspect you'd have plenty of testers.
As far as backups go, its as simple as a script to copy or rdiff the
datafiles to another directory before opening gnucash --nofile. At least
that's what I'd do so I would never lose more than one session's work
(not that hard to duplicate) in event of catastrophic failure.
A
Josh Sled wrote:
On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 17:21 -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
Been lurking lately and wonder what is involved in testing and how can I
help? I'm a daily user running three businesses with gnucash and have
some very ancient programming experience. If I can help out by testing
and (hopefully) giving useful feedback, I'd be happy to do it.
- side-by-side comparisons of 1.8 and G2 looking for bugs, differences
and regressions. This can happen at any point... including now so we
have a good handle on how much work is left. Anything noted should
go into GNOME2_STATUS (rather than bugzilla).
- a canonical set of test data files would be invaluable as people come
on board and want to test or report issues. While we also want to
encourage people to use their own, real, data to expose the code to
variety, it's nice to have a known set of data to share, reproduce,
converse-about and synchronize against.
My ideal version of these files would include the minimum number of
cases to test every feature, account-type, default- and
secondary-commodity, reconciliation scenario, and situation.
Obviously this is impractical, but we can at least hit the major ones
pretty easily.
We'd also want a set of fairly regular data to test reporting,
balance-computation, &c. One could probably script-generate some QIF
transactions to import (or maybe an XML datafile directly) or get
creative with their system clock and the scheduled transactions, to
create a year's worth of data with computable properties (all
expenses should sum to $20,000; the Expenses:Rent should have 12 txns
of $1000 ea., &c.)
- test instructions or scripts for other/new people to execute against
in different environments... including us. :) Especially with all
the UI work done, we're going to need to test actually stepping
through a set of interactions with the UI to make sure things work as
expected. The other side is that if people are stepping through the
same set of instructions, you're only testing that one path through
the UI and missing other cases... but I still think there's value
here.
...jsled
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