PCF Testing

Introduction

Participatory Culture Foundation is a 501c3 non-profit based in Worcester, MA. We were founded in 2005 with a mission to build tools and services that give people more ways to engage in their culture.

Currently we have several desktop and web-based projects in active development that are available for interns to participate.

Miro

Miro is our core project, available at getmiro.com. It is a free open-source cross-platform desktop video application that is designed to make mass media more open and accessible for everyone.

Written in python it is essentially a desktop media library that integrates rss feeds , BitTorrent technology, and search capability of multiple online websites (blip.tv, youtube, google…) to promote open distribution and consumption of media.

Miro Guide

Included with Miro, is the Miro Guide, our open content directory. It is browsed by a large and global audience of Miro users and is also available in any web browser at miroguide.com.

Miro Video Converter

The Miro Video Converter provides a super simple way to convert almost any video to MP4, WebM (vp8), Ogg Theora, or for Android, iPhone, and more.

Miro Community

Miro Community provides users a simple way to create their own custom video-based website. It works with free video hosting services, and enables site creators to aggregate related content from several sources. Users can import, publish and discuss content.

Universal Subtitles

The Universal Subtitles mission is to make captioning, subtitling, and translating video publicly accessible in a way that’s free and open, just like the Web

What do we want from internship participants?

QA for our projects is completely integrated into the development process.  Quality is a part of the entire release cycle, and each code change is evaluated and tested.  We are very flexible about where you work from, but we expect you to be self-motivated, dedicated, driven, professional, independent, and ready to get your hands dirty.

Duration

Ideally, an internship will last approximately 4-6 months.  This should give participants a reasonable amount of time to get familiar with the application and our process.  Because we plan for short release cycles, you should be able to experience all parts of the development process.

Development Process

Our development team is distributed around the world and maintains constant communication mainly via our irc channel and through weekly discussions.  We use an agile development process and define our releases in short cycles.  Once core features and bug fixes are decided upon for a release cycle – they are given top priority in the target milestone in bugzilla.  Developers work off these lists, and testing is able to immediately verify these changes through the nightly build generation.  When the agreed upon features and bugs are fixed, and the software is tested both internally and by external volunteers, it is deemed ready to release.

This is a brief overview of our cycle.  As a team we are committed to continuous improvement and during the course of weekly development calls evaluate our processes and tools and make adjustments as deemed necessary.

Tools

1. Bugzilla
2. Litmus
3. Timeline
4. IRC (irc.freenode.org #miro and #miro-hackers)
5. Mailing Lists (testing , development )
6. Wiki Pages
7. planet.getmiro.com blogs
8. Git – source control for automation projects hosted on github
9. Selenium-rc with the python client for website test automation
10. Sikuli – for desktop automation

Tasks