Today, one day after reaching the third Maverick milestone, Alpha 3, I am happy to announce the birth of a new testing project and team in Ubuntu: the Desktop Testing Team.
Every time we release a new Ubuntu milestone, testers are encouraged to install the new milestone and play around with it, filing bugs as they go. We want to go a bit further and use a more methodological approach for those people that love testing and want to help improving Ubuntu that way.
How will it work?
For every milestone of the development release of Ubuntu, we will be providing a series of testcases for you to run in that milestone. As soon as the milestone is officially released, you will be able to complete the tests in the following two weeks (although we encourage you to run them as soon as possible, to allow enough time for developers to fix the bugs).
One of the good things about this program is that you, as testers, will be able to know every time what to test, you will be able to check the new features before anybody else, and you will gain experience on the Ubuntu development process. Also, there will be a mailing list to share your experiences, bugs and to have direct feedback from the developers.
We will we using a test tracker to track your results and positive feedback (a test passed correctly) will be also really helpful. Right now, if things are working correctly, the developers need to guess it from the lack of test reports.
When will it start?
Just now! Although we don’t have a lot of testcases yet, we wanted to start the program just after the release of Maverick Alpha 3. The first weeks of the program are going to be busy and fun. Apart from testing and updating results, we are going to be introducing ourselves in the mailing list, commenting what testcases need updates and what applications we need to add when we reach Maverick Beta.
How can I participate?
Start by joining the Launchpad team and subscribe to the mailing list. Introduce yourself in the mailing list, tell us about you and what applications are you mostly interested in. Create an account in the tracker (if you already have an account at iso.qa.ubuntu.com it will work as well). Blog about it, tell your friends, tweet it. And, of course, start testing Maverick Alpha 3. We are going to make Ubuntu better. And GNOME. And many other applications that are part of Ubuntu.
You can find the full documentation on how to test on the Desktop Testing wiki page
[Discuss Desktop Testing Team on the Forums]
Originally posted here by Ara Pulido on August 6, 2010