[Libreoffice-qa] Proposal: Calls for Testing

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi developers, Hi QAers,

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 09:43:21AM +0200, Cor Nouws wrote:
> My take on this:
> - What does make sense, is having indeed a list of areas that can be
> clearly pointed at, and to mention them in a sort of standard post
> on our official TDF blog. E.g. every two weeks 4 to 8 items and
> guiding users interested to test in these area's to the daily
> builds.
> This is in the minutes:
> > [...]
> >AA   - propose proactive QA-list CCing on ESC (Bjoern)
> > [...]
> >AA   - Blog regularly about affected areas with call for testing (Cor/Bjoern?)

lazy me forgot to discuss that action item on the last ESC call (luckily for
everyone else, as that call was already too long). So here is what we should do
to enable this:

Whenever you (developer) have roughly finished working on bugfixing in an area
of code or implemented a feature, send a email to both:

   libreoffice at lists.freedesktop.org
   libreoffice-qa at list.freedesktop.org

with the subject starting with "[CFT]" (call for testing) and a description of
where your changes roughly are. The call for testing is assumed to be for
master, unless it says something different. Additional tags might be added to
provide more info to the call. Here are some example subjects:

 [CFT FEATURE] Better UI for Headers and Footers

This would be a new feature on master.

 [CFT 3-5] Copy Paste in Calc

This would be bugfixing of the copy paste code for Calc on the 3.5 release
branch.

You might notice this is a combination of two other ad-hoc workflows we used to
get started: the patch review workflow and the UX-advise mailing list to build
bridges from development to the outside world. Having written such a mail does
not guarantee there will be an army of testers skydiving on the feature, but it
will:
- lower insecurities in QA when feature is ready to be investigated
- give QA a motivation to test master early
- be an awesome base for writing our release notes, writing testcases for
  Litmus (or whatever other tooling we will be using), calls for testing on
  blogs etc.

In fact, unless there is violent disagreement with this, we should just start
doing this and see how it goes. ;)

Best,

Bjoern