Vivid QA incentives report

[Paul White]

On Sat, 16 May 2015, at 13:00, xubuntu-devel-request at lists.ubuntu.com
wrote:

> We still need to increase participation in QA, but we need to think of
> better ways to encourage participation. Acknowledgement and
> recognition given by members of the Xubuntu team should be part of
> this. Perhaps an email from the project lead thanking them for their
> work when we notice someone is doing a lot of testing, or mention that
> they've done good work on social media or a profile of them on our
> site. These kinds of surprise, non-mechanical tokens of gratitude go
> much further than some stickers they won for competing for most tests
> completed. Speaking for myself, these kinds of non-stuff rewards
> certainly have motivated me in the past. Thoughts?

As one of your "sticker" winners I was very surprised that my rather
small contribution qualified as a the winning contribution but looking
at the QA Tracker I could see that I was one of just a few non-Xubuntu
team members recording their tests.

Although I did record a couple of installations onto actual hardware the
bulk of my tests were for live sessions, both 32 and 64-bit, running not
only the documented test cases but also making sure that certain other
applications and functionality was working correctly very much as if I
was using Xubuntu for the first time. As you know the QA Tracker gets
littered with "bug icons" which simply alert users to the existence of a
bug but hide the bug description. Holding the mouse pointer over each
icon to find out which bug is being represented is tedious and I'm
really not interested in knowing that a bug has been reported for a KDE
application if I'm testing Xubuntu, like wise a Xubuntu/Xfce specific
bug doesn't interest me if I'm testing for Kubuntu. Obviously the QA
Tracker is not going to change in the near future to make things easier
for testers of specific flavours but I would be very interested to hear
how things might be made easier for testers. Might this also help
attract more testers or increase the testing of existing testers?

The Kubuntu Team have their Trello board where certain tasks can be
allocated and commented on. How about something similar for Xubuntu such
as an etherpad where known bugs can be recorded and comments added? Any
potential bug fixes could be posted and moved around depending on their
importance. Once bugs have been fixed or problems resolved, items could
then be removed. The etherpad would therefore be a summary of
outstanding issues.

I'm suggesting this as I'm often at a loss what to test for. I'm
inundated with emails from various lists which I read at various times
of the day on various devices and by the time I get around to do some
testing at the weekend I've forgotten about the most important items. 

Anything that can highlight current testing requirements would be of
great help to me and I'm sure to others.
-- 
  Paul White
  PaulW2U at ubuntu.com