On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 8:55 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Good morning. > > What are the typical time commitments expected? > > I have almost 30 years in banking software development and support but have > been away from development directly for a while. QA is exceptionally > important to any project but with the broad use of Open Office, quality QA is > critical. > > I would love to assist. >
Hello Mike, Thanks for writing. We're happy to have volunteers of all skill levels and availability. Something you will probably want to consider is the fixed tasks that need to be done before doing formal testing, things needed to maintain a reproducible test environment, like downloading and doing a fresh install of the latest test build of OpenOffice. There are ways of making this fast and painless, such as using virtual machines (VirtualBox is one free solution that several of us use), but if you are doing this manually you can probably count on 30 minutes or so overhead. Since it is probably not very satisfying to spend all of your time installing OpenOffice, you would probably want to arrange your time so you could spend 2 or more hours per build. And you don't want to waste time testing very old builds. So that suggests something like 2 hours on a build every other week for a minimum level of engagement. The QA work comes in waves, as you probably know from your commercial software experience. Right now it is relatively quiet. Our recent OpenOffice 3.4.1 has been doing well -- no urgent bugs reported there. So we're looking forward to the 4.0 features to show up in builds, so we can test them. And we're also looking at increasing our overall test automation coverage of existing features. We also have a steady stream of new bug reports from users that need to be verified. (Many end up as duplicates or user errors, but they all need to be looked at) And of course, this is now an excellent time to help orient new QA volunteers. I invite you to poke around and see what we're working on. Our QA page here has links to more information, including some new volunteer orientation pages you may find useful: http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/qa.html Finally, I'd recommend that you subscribe to this QA mailing list by sending an email to [email protected]. Regards, -Rob > I look forward to hearing from you. > > Mike Treen > Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
