Bug workflow - a wider view

[Bryce Harrington]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2007 at 09:19:55PM +0200, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> Bryce Harrington wrote:
> > One thing I think could help a lot is to give more emphasis (and
> > recognition) to those who are filling the tester role.  I think the
> > overall workflow process would go smoother if we had more testers, with
> > better tools, processes, and know-how.
> >   
> That's a good perspective to bring to the debate. The laptop testing 
> team was quite active for a few cycles (after we sent out laptops). It 
> would be great to see that effort revived. During the Feisty cycle we 
> also grew a great team of volunteer ISO testers.
> 
> The ISO tracker has the potential for being extended to cover test cases 
> of different kinds, from Mozilla to kernel and xorg updates. In the same 
> we we currently list ISOs and test cases we would list milestones or 
> proposed package updates and test cases for those.

There's also two different paths that a tester could take.  One is to
focus on a specific package (maximize domain knowledge) and find lots of
various ways to test it.  The other is to master a specific set of
tools (e.g. dogtail, or ethereal, or whatever), and then apply them
across a breadth of packages sequentially (maximize problem knowledge).  

An elaboration on the latter approach I've thought could be fun for
folks would be to organize a team of testers each specialized in a
different kind of analysis, and pick one project/package a week or a
month to tackle.  Sort of like how Wikipedia does with their Featured
Article of the Day.  Even more important than finding bugs would be to
leave the framework of tests and tools for future developers, users, and
testers to use.  Maybe there could be some tie-ins with other efforts
like the bug days.

Bryce