Oh! I realized I didn't send out the Learning Testing Links from last week - so here they are. They're all short this week.
The first one is something I've been thinking a lot about especially with recent discussions about the design of our testing infrastructure - I think a lot of what I've been trying to communicate lately is that we *are* designing it, here, together. Good practices aren't automatic; we have to try things we think will work, see if they do, and tweak them so they'll be better. A lot of things are missing, and a lot of things could be working better, and we /are/ improving, week by week. Sometimes things are confusing or don't make sense or don't exist, not by design or by deliberate exclusion, but because nobody's gotten around to fixing (or realizing) it yet. I've been very encouraged to see so many people finding problems, articulating them, and then stepping up with their own solutions (like the smoke testing spreadsheet/form, running test sprints, putting up semantic mediawiki tables...) - that's exactly the kind of initiative-taking we need, and the kind of thing I've been trying really hard to encourage. How can we get more of it to happen? It seems to me that our process is currently very stigmergic (which I personally like). I would describe stigmergy as "The process of communicating about something (in this case, our testing process) by modifying that something." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy (the related resources are pretty cool). We do a lot of this - I'm not sure how conscious of it we are. </soapbox> More "normal" testing resources follow. :) First up is OLPC's development workflow in Trac, as written by Michael. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Trac_ticket_workflow And a few things on writing up good bug reports - which is a huge part of bug advocacy. If developers produce code, then testers produce bug reports. (That's one view, anyway. Of course, developers also produce a lot of things, like tools to make code, hosting infrastructures, documentation, mailing list traffic... testers make things other than bug reports too, but it's one take on our "basic unit of productivity.") General resource (I've posted this here before, but I think we have some new people now): http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html Some other projects' bug reporting guidelines: http://docs.moodle.org/en/How_to_write_a_good_bug_report https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Bug_writing_guidelines Thanks, everyone. Have a wonderful holiday season! --Mel _______________________________________________ Testing mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/testing
