The KDE Quality Team is designed to, amongst other things, manage the release tesing for KDE and move towards having a structured approach rather than just releasing some code, and seeing what happens.
This means keeping clear instructions on how to install the latest betas, promoting testing and trying to do the testing more effectively.
What's being done
- Making easy instructions on how to get the latest release
- Making and running "release checklists" for various components of KDE to ensure everything still works as it should
- Making a list of changed areas, and putting an emphasis on testing these
- Running bug days, with bug reporting tutorials to improve the usefulness of the bug reports
As a developer how can I help/benefit from this?
If you have refactored a large area of code, or introduced a new feature, please add it to the to-test list (http://community.kde.org/Getinvolved/Quality/Beta/4.10/AreasToTest) along with instructions of how to get to test it. Use end-user terminology, and keep things deliberately vague to encourage users to spot bugs in areas that you (as a developer) haven't thought about.
Be on top of the bugzilla lists. KDE only works if all developers are on top of triaging their own products, confirming bugs, closing duplicates and invalid bugs and of course, fixing them 🙂
As a distro packager, how can I help?
Make sure our wiki page of "how to get the latest beta" (http://community.kde.org/Getinvolved/Quality/Beta/4.10/Installing) is up to date with clear instructions. A link to the relevant release page is enough. It's a wiki for a reason, edit away 🙂
Help co-ordinate
You may have noticed we're running a bit behind this release. We really need to step it up, both now and for future releases. It's a new-ish team, and I've ended up being ridiculously busy.
We have a number of ways to get involved in the managing side of KDE Quality:
- Redesigning the landing wiki page to be more graphic, easy to navigate and inviting
- Updating our list of changed areas in 4.10 that need extensive testing
- Co-ordinate with the kde-promo team to include testing instructions on the release notes
- Hang around our IRC channel #kde-quality to help answer testers questions
It's a real work in progress, but we're already showing real results both in terms of bugs reported, and bugs fixed.
Join our mailing list [https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-testing] or find us in #kde-quality.