Mail/News QA - You Can Make a Difference

In the spirit of open source development, the folks responsible for the quality of the commercial Mozilla product are bringing the Net community into every stage of the development process, including Quality Assurance (QA) and are currently identifying people who would like to help out. This help can come in many different forms:

Testing with different hardware configurations
Testing with different mail servers (including different configurations and load levels)
Testing with a wide spectrum of real-world data files
Testing composition and display of HTML/rich text messages
Testing interoperability with different mail readers
Identifying usability problems
Identifying parity issues where features may be missing or inconsistent across platforms
Giving feedback on existing test specifications and test cases
Writing test specifications and test cases
Executing test specifications and test cases
Identifying bugs, writing bugs, and verifying bugs
Or really, help in any form at all from people who have extra time and want to help make a better product!

If you'd like to help out, mail your name, email address with the following information:

area(s) of the mailnews client that most interest you (such as POP, IMAP, Movemail, HTML layout, MIME, newsgroup reading/posting, return receipts, Y2K compliance, etc).
platform(s) you can test on: Windows, Macintosh, or Linux (including which version of each)
mail or news server(s) you have access to
your hardware configuration(s) and operating system(s)
anything that you think is unique about your configuration
how many hours a week do you expect that you'll be able to help
anything else you want to tell us!

You don't need to promise any particular level of participation. If more help is needed in the area of your interest, you will be contacted and asked if you are interested in taking on a small project, or perhaps even a single test, at that time. People will participate to varying degrees, depending on how much time they want to contribute.

What do you get out of it? Er... how about self-satisfaction? A better product? Industry experience?

Your personal information will not be used for anything by the MailNews QA Team other than communicating with you about your testing assistance. If you do take a role in the testing process, your name and email information will be published (if you wish) to the QA Contacts page on mozilla.org.

Thanks for your interest! Be sure to take a look at the Getting Started page to get yourself situated to Mozilla Mail/News QA!

Developed a new feature? If you've come to this page from the Mozilla Mail/News Job List page, then you're probably a developer who wants to write some new features for Mozilla and wants to find out how to get your feature tested by the Mozilla community. Here are some suggestions:

Write a document on how your feature will work and what its limitations will be. Anyone reading your "spec" should be able to visualize and understand how your feature works so that good test cases can be developed for it.
With this document available, you can post to any of the QA newsgroups in order to find someone who will be able to test your feature.
If there is no volunteer, you may want to write your own test plan and test cases for your feature. Be sure to include any test harness that you may have created.

Thanks to Stacey Curtis for her feedback drafting this document.