On 12/16/2011 12:12 PM, Per Jessen wrote:
James Knott wrote:
Per Jessen wrote:
Why no more volunteers to do testing? Well, it is difficult, you need expertise, you need space in the disk, or an extra computer, etc. I don't believe "more testers" => "more areas tested" - at best, it might mean "same areas tested more".
I guess it depends on areas of interest. Back when I was at IBM, the team members had specific areas. For example my areas were the base OS/2 system, Personal Communications, antivirus and some utilities. Others did Lotus Notes, Smart Suite etc. With 12.1, my testing was just general use on a notebook computer, so stuff like WiFi was checked, but not fetchmail.
Hypothetically, if you had seen that 12.1 was being delayed due to insufficient testing of fetchmail (without defining what "insufficient" means in this context), might you have been inclined to run some of defined fetchmail tests? (defined = previously documented tests).
Maybe the status of pending releases and the current todo list can be made more visible? Something right on the main home page and on every download page? Like the countdown thingie but more informative than a simple date, and more prominent or somehow enticing. A phrase that applies here is "Make it easy for them to get it right." If you want more people to put in effort testing things, you have to smooth the way to get to the actual testing and reporting as much as possible, starting with making it harder to ignore or avoid that testing is even needed and that the product will suffer unless "you" help, and make sure even the casual glancer can tell that there are things even lowly they can help with. Also a roster of involved people with stats, number of involved projects or bugs etc, where people can see their name up in lights. Some kind of simple single graphic that expresses the overall state, like how much % green vs yellow & red, or how high the thermometer like fund raisers always use. In this case I think something that grows toward 100% complete is less compelling than something that gets smaller to show the remaining problems going away. That should better inspire people to decide to bother to help get rid of that last little thing if that's all that's left. Then when you click on it you get a more expanded view of the current state, but still not the overwhelming full everything details, still somewhat of a summary of categories of problems. Maybe tag different problems or todo items by estimated difficulty or required skill level too. So someone could discover easily that some apps just need a man page written up, or others that need actual testing, but could be tested purely in a vm using a suse studio iso and virtualbox on any pc even windows with not all that many clicks. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org