If everything goes well By next week we should be building Thunderbird 3.0 release candidate 1. Once that version of Thunderbird is ready it needs to be tested. The testing effort is nothing but reading, doing reading and pressing buttons on a Web page. As there are good chances for that build to become the final 3.0, the Thunderbird Quality Assurance (QA) team wants to make sure that this build is tested to the maximum extend possible. For that we are organizing a week long effort to cover the Full Functional Test (FFT) suite Thunderbird has.
A FFT is made up of 45 areas of tests. Each area containing from one to thirty tests. Each test looks like the screen-shot below :
As you can see there are two columns. One containing what to do on the left. While the right column contains what to verify. The lower part of the screen being used to report how the the product behaved with regards to the test. Nothing really complicated.
As stated above there are a good amount of testing. To test Thunderbird 3.0 RC as extensively as possible the QA Team is looking for volunteers that are willing to devote from 20 minutes to an hours to do some tests. The idea is to divide work. Instead of having everybody concentrating on the Installation phase – we can have people looking at some parts of Thunderbird that are not tested so often. To Participate to this effort you will need :
- From 20 minutes to an hour.
- An account on Litmus – the tools where the test are and the result will be.
- An account on bugzilla – so you can report bugs if you find some.
- To send me an email (see below) so I can divide the work and let you know what to tests.
As you might have noticed I’m asking no more than one hour, while I said the effort would last a week. This is to give you future participants more flexibility on when you can/should do your tests. It will also let myself and a few other plenty of time to run as much test as possible. And lastly we will offer our help online.
I’m asking people to sign up so I can divide the work, and send them an individual email when the builds are ready. That email will contain precise instructions on what to test, on how to get in touch with the QA team if you have an issue while testing and don’t know what to do. To sign up send me an email at ludovic@mozillamessaging.com , with the following information :
- What OS you’ll be testing on (we need a few more mac users and linux users btw)
- What kind of account you have (ie. POP, NNTP, RSS, IMAP)
- Anything you would like to test in particular (your interests)
Testing now is the best way for you to enjoy the new features of Thunderbird 3.0 and to make sure the things you care about are working.