AndrewZ
Moderator
Joined: 21 Jun 2004
Posts: 4140
Location: Colorado, USA
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 Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2007 6:19 am Post subject: How to volunteer to improve OOo quality |
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This is intended as a concise, short guide. Please ask for more details if necessary.
Why?
When you volunteer to QA OpenOffice.org, it accomplishes several things. First, you may identify new bugs which others have not found. Second, you free the valuable time of highly-skilled developers to work on more directly improving OpenOffice.org.
Who?
You don't need software programming experience, but can help. You also don't need an especially big amount of time because you can work on however many issues whenever. People are needed with a variety of operating systems, graphics cards, network types, documents, printers, etc.
Prerequisites
You need an Issue Tracker account.
Optionally, you can upgrade your account with extra permissions by officially joining the QA team: basically you post a request to the QA mailing list.
Optionally, you can browse or join the QA mailing list.
How to test?
Testing is one way to help. You are looking for problems such as crashes, unexpected behavior, and documentation errors. You can do any combination of casual testing, structured manua testing, and automated testing. You can follow pre-defined tests, or you can make your own. You can test newly-added features in a release candidate, or you can look for regressions (something that worked for a long time but suddenly broke).
You should either test the latest stable release or the latest development build (downloads).
It's not necessary to announce "I am going to work on this issue" because each individual issue takes a short amount of time to QA.
How to report?
When you find a bug, you should report it.
1. Read Reporting Bugs which has instructions for checking for duplicates, rules like "one issue per report," etc.
2. Submit the issue with relevant information including operating system type and version, OpenOffice.org version, and steps to reproduce. If applicable, attach a concise sample document.
How to triage bugs?
Triaging bugs is a major way to contribute as a QA volunteer. Basically, you look through issues either newly-reported or marked UNCONFIRMED. Then, you investigate whether the issue follows rules/guidelines such as:
1. Is the issue a duplicate?
2. Is there only one issue per report?
3. Does the issue have adequate detail?
4. Is the issue reproducible?
Then, you add a comment like of these:
"Looks like a duplicate of issue 1234"
"I can reproduce on OpenOffice.org 2.2RC3 Windows XP."
"Can you attach the document that produces this bug?"
How to find bugs to triage
1. Do an Issue Tracker query for bugs filed since few days ago or see the page OOo Planet
2. Do an Issue Tracker query for UNCONFIRMED bugs
3. See QA Metrics links
How to get help as a QA volunteer?
Ask me or write the QA mailing list. If you want, I will mentor you. Also, people on the QA mailing list will mentor you.
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