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