What makes a good tester?
Posted by Janet
The team here at PCF recognizes the importance of testing and the value that it adds to a project. As I continually ask friends, family members and sometimes complete strangers to help out with the testing – I often suspect that people are a bit fearful about diving in.
“I’m not a tester”, “I don’t know how to write code”, “I never tested anything before.” These are some of the phrases that I regularly hear, and once and for all – I just want to say – It doesn’t matter.
In my opinion, anyone can be a tester. All you have to do is try a few things, maybe follow some instructions and report the results.
In order to be a Good tester, there are a few more standards, but perhaps not what you would expect
- Education… is completely irrelevant.
- Programming skills… we leave that up to the developers. One of our biggest concerns is the end user experience. If you, as a non-programmer, have trouble using or understanding Miro, that is a bug. It is preferred that you communicate your finding in a sentence or two.
- Courage… You have to be willing to try. If you find something that you think is a bug, report it or ask someone. Don’t be afraid to be wrong.
- Creativity… Look at what a particular feature does – then think about what else it might do, or could do, or should do. Then think of ways to make it do things that it shouldn’t do. Then, write it down, so someone else can expand on your ideas.
- Diligence… Testing isn’t always fun, and can sometimes be a little repetitious. But those regressions tests need to be run. The more people we have looking at the builds on a regular basis – the better Miro will be for everyone!
So – if you are ready to join us, sign up for the mailing list, or subscribe to this post, and say hello on the irc.
January 19th, 2008 at 1:28 am
hi I am on the computer all the time and love miro.
I have certificate 2 in it and am a prity good teck already I am doing cert 3 this year so I would love to test anything you have that needs testing ok I will probably use a combination’s of vmwair and normal pc to do the job.
I like vmwair becours if anything happens it can be wiped and reloded in minnets
January 21st, 2008 at 4:24 am
Hi Edward –
We would love to have your help! You can check out the QA wiki page: http://www.getmiro.com/wiki/index.php/Miro_Quality_Assurance to get an idea of the areas where we need help.
Also – you can subscribe to this blog if you haven’t already and it’ll keep you posted on our regular testing needs.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:28 am
I am a retired hardware/software test and diagnostics engineer. For the past six years I’ve focused upon learning all aspects of multimedia. At present, I am exploring use of VideoLan (VLC) Player for format conversions. I operate my own server so that I can control both ends of the pipe for testing purposes. I’m not sure what you want in this area but contact me if you need help.
Al Olmstead
September 6th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
I luv Miro and I tried to make some suggestions about videosearch improvements. It is unfortunate that there is one site for everything, but it’s all scattered around the web in different sites… this for testing, another for forum (where I can’t log-in or register) another for support (getsatisfaction.com) and so forth. It makes it very difficult to get in touch with the community and to share ideas. Anyhow if you like you can check out the post here where I also placed some quick comps to better explain the idea.
http://getsatisfaction.com/participatoryculturefoundation/topics/so_much_garbage_on_youtube_can_a_tag_based_search_filter_be_implemented_in_miro
Cheers!
March 19th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Hello!
I have some trubbles with Miro appearance. I have Ubuntu 8.10 with Ukrainian locale. The Miro window opens too large and symbols in menu row are quite strange. All latin symbols are OK. All cyrillic – something wrong. I have screenshot. Where I can send it and how I can help with fixing this problem?
May 11th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Alexander, the best place is to post a bug in Bugzilla. Here is a link to get you started: https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/GoodBugReports