From D to Q to C with plenty of T

2006-Jun-6 - It's All About Me

As if I didn't have enough to do with books to read, blogs to surf and the World Cup to get ready for, I volunteered to do some testing in my spare ( what's that again ? ) time

A newbie had posted on QA forums looking for ideas on how to get a new start in testing.
One of the suggestions was to sign up for an open source project and that seemed a great idea so I went and found a small project, ShortCutter, to try out and signed up.

Downloaded the latest version and started testing and found some bugs - emailed the project admin to find where to report the bugs and then logged them.

I soon started getting emails telling me that my bugs were being fixed - I was pleased that I wasn't getting any emails asking how to reproduce the bug or telling me that a bug wasn't a bug

All reported bugs fixed, a new version was available
Downloaded

And there was my name in the About credits
Listed as a tester
Cool

It was good testing practice, a chance to give something back to the community and my name in lights
Or an About Box anyway

Anywhere else I can volunteer my services ?

2006-Jun-8 - Participation....

Posted by michaeljf

This is a cool idea, and I think I mentioned this in a response somewhere else in the site. I often hear Developers say they tried some new app, or built something new last night or over the weekend and have a new way to do it. I've never thought of a way to sit home and try a new test method until this came up.
- M

Edited by michaeljf on 2006-Jun-8 at 10:55

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2006-Jun-11 - Open Source - come on in the water's fine

Posted by csbdeady

Your comments on volunteering as a Tester for an Open Source project are interesting because one often sees "Developer needed for Project X" (not literally Project-X - that was a game by Team 17 years ago!) but accompanying this are normally requests for "anyone to be a Tester". Fair enough - if you can't program in Cee-plus-sharp or ht-xm-slt or some such then you can't develop, but most projects seem to miss the differentiation between "beta testers" and "Professional Testers" (yes with a capital T;)

Beta testing is of course very important - as witnessed by MS and the latest round of Windows Vista releases, but equally so is having your software critiqued by those whose entire reason for being in IT is to jump for joy whenever a bug is discovered. It would be nice to see mention of "Wanted: Developers and Professional Testers" in more open source projects.

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2006-Jun-11 - Educating

Posted by philk10

I remember Project X
and Team 17, wonder what happened to them, are they still going ?

as to your main point - fair comment but my boss at work is having to fight our chairman who thinks that 'anyone can test' and cant see why a programmer should move to testing
But with the open source project that I am working on I think I've opened the eyes of the main developer into what Good Testing is - and he now knows what a Smoke Test is !

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