As Jim stated in the previous email...
"On another subject: It seems we have a lot of sysadmins offering
time, so we might even be able to dedicate certain ones to certain
setups ("specialists" I guess they could be called). For example, it
would be best to have an admin who uses Dovecot on a daily basis to be
responsible for its testing. They would be more likely to know quirks
and what might be a configuration issue. If someone reports a problem,
a specialist could test, attempt to reproduce the problem, and gather
more information before the ticket is passed on to an actual
developer. Just another idea..."
If you are a SysAdmin and would like to be involved in a
non-developer aspect please respond to this email. It sounds like Jim
has some resources at his disposal and we could pool our efforts to
produce a good testing environment. What Jim and I have already
discussed is scheduling a script to pull down the current versions
from SVN and redeploy and test the RC installs. Scripting the syncing
via SVN, putting the files in place, adjusting the config file and
rebuilding the database are all simple steps that we can put together.
From there we need to generate a set of sample emails into the
system so that we can test show RC handles it. One way to automate
those test is the Selenium tool. (http://www.openqa.org/selenium/) We
can put together a series of testing using Selenium IDE
(http://www.openqa.org/selenium-ide/) which one of can run manually to
go through each of the automated tests. We can log any bugs as they
happen.
And the Selenium tests will run in FireFox, MSIE, Opera or Safari,
so once we have these tests working we can make the available for
testers to run on the various browser and platform versions beyond
what we may test among ourselves. I expect to just test FireFox and
MSIE.
These tests will help accelerate development and offload some of the
testing done by the developers.
Brennan Stehling Offwhite.net LLC brennan@offwhite.net