Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
JeffM wrote:
Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
Inviting end users who are incapable of coding or testing
is an empty promise.
Describe more fully "incapable of testing".
What I mean is that most end users can demo a program, play around for a
bit, and generally satisfy themselves that "it works" for their favorite
tasks. They might accidentally stumble upon a problem. But they won't
perform rigorous, systematic testing such as navigating to each and
every option on a menu. So if you have a feature that's rarely used, or
if it doesn't elicit interest or curiosity because of its menu location,
name, or description, it won't be tested. In this scenario, you need a
very large cohort of testers with very diverse interests (ways of using
the program).
Allow me to say, that using SeaMonkey the way you intend to use the
final product is especially useful, even in our beta's.
If you report a problem you do see, in the way you do use the product,
it usually helps. Just because you don't touch menu item alpha-omega, or
use chatzilla, or whatever, doesn't mean your feedback is not valuable.
I've been surprised at seemingly obvious issues like "There is no
chatzilla in my build" that was brought to my attention on IRC once.
With a bit of back and forth from a willing tester (who, is willing to
help but has no real dev knowledge, and doesn't have time to go above
and beyond his nornmal use..) I was able to figure out a problem with
our 2.1 series and l10n release builds.... It turned out to be a very
big problem at the time, but one I would have missed since I only use
english.
Other issues that are relatively obscure could also be caught by
automated testing (admittedly our actual attention on that on our code
is lax, since we have many known-failures atm... most of the failures
are not actual issues -- due to Gecko/Firefox tests assuming that
browser in most cases). And once we do get our internal testing scheme
up to a better state [one of my priorities] we can catch issues
[breaks/regressions] much earlier. Doesn't mean we will ever catch them
all, nor does it mean we will catch all issues in new features, but it
surely helps the confidence :-)
--
~Justin Wood (Callek)
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