Hi Alberto,
I have thought for quite some time to the idea of building a community-based openSUSE testing team, and this seems to be the right time to discuss of it.
The main idea is to create a group of stable testers to deeply test openSUSE functionalities on their machines, in order to catch annoying bugs earlier in the development stages, allowing the fixes to be done and tested again in a more timely and less rushed manner.
It won't be easy, we need motivated volunteers and we have a lot to learn to do it the right way, but I think it is worth the effort, if we want to keep faith to the guiding principles, which states openSUSE aims to be "the most usable Linux distribution" (and not the most cutting edge one!).
I summed up the motivations, a short problem analysis about the current status quo, and some proposal of solution in the attached slides so you can comment them (thanks suseROCKs for the slide template). [...] All suggestions (and volunteers) are more than welcome, as well as some help from Novell people currently involved in testing/quality assurance. As I said we need to learn. ;-)
Thanks a lot for bringing up this topic. I think you are right - a Community testing team would help the openSUSE project a lot. I'm responsible for openSUSE testing in Novell and - as some other mentioned before - we already spent some efforts to make testing more easier for the Community: - http://en.opensuse.org/Testing It's the entrance point for testing of openSUSE and includes a "openSUSE 11.1 Feature Test Plan". - opensuse-testing@opensuse.org The mailing list to discuss and coordinate testing efforts. - FreeNode #opensuse-testing An IRC channel to directly get in touch with other testers. - openSUSE 11.1 Feature Testing Day on Thursday November, 5th 2008 So you can see there are already some activities in the testing area. Nevertheless there could be much more and I'm willing to help you and all other Community members that are also willing to help. So feel free to get in touch with me either directly or on own of the mailing lists. Best wishes, Holgi -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org