[Kolab-devel] Enabling testers

[Bernhard Reiter]

Dear friends of the Kolab-Development,

one of the most time consuming part 
of creating the Kolab KDE client and Server implementations 
has been the quality management, the testing, bugreporting and so on.

As the interest in Kolab has massively grown, 
the key developers and the designers are the bottle neck
and this is unlikely to change soon.
Many of us do a lot of testing, but this is one point where we
can involve the community better and I am thinking about how.

Best would be if we had a fully automated testsuite,
but this is quite hard to set up. It would involve a way
to automatically build snapshots for the server and then scripts
for setting up virtual servers and running tests.
Testing the KDE client is also not easy, having something like
dogtail [1] in place would be a start.

So we are down to manual testing for the real interesting part.
Very interesting would be to have test cases that users
could just run through, with a reporting system, so developers
know that stuff is working fine on the various platforms and settings.

What helps right away is, that if you see bugs on "testing" in our tracker,
give them a test and add your comment.
If you see an issue that should be reported to KDE or a different tracker,
you could help doing so. Also the conncetions back are wanted.

The success of the Kolab community depends on us finding good ways
to share a common visions and work towards it.
There is a commercial side of Kolab with the Kolab-Konsortium and others,
but this is not a contradiction to doing everything as Free Software
and together with a community.

Best Regards,
Bernhard

[1] http://people.redhat.com/zcerza/dogtail/
     It needs an AT-SPI enabled desktop, which currently only 
     GNOME seems to have.