QA Advance Volunteer List?

[Jamethiel Knorth]

I am hoping that a service could be offered by the Quality Team to have 
people sign up in advance to be active at a later date. That is very 
unclear, so let me explain:

I could sign on now, giving my e-mail to a list, basically saying, "I'm 
really busy and can't work now, but call me when a lot of work is needed."

That sounds really bad, but the idea would be that, when the next version of 
KDE was primed for release, right when the feature freeze went in, everyone 
who had put themselves on that list would be e-mailed. I am somewhat in this 
situation right now. I post a bit on KDE-Usability, and don't have enough 
time on my hands to really work on the Quality Team. However, I could spare 
a week or three once a year to really get down to business when the feature 
freeze is in.

Also, from my experience with programs, it is very hard to write 
documentation before a feature freeze. Screenshots are out of date almost 
the second they are taken, howto's never exist for the new (and as such 
unknown and in need of a howto) features, and options will move or disappear 
the instant you write down where they are.

I am not up to doing any sort of QA work on a regular basis, but I would 
love to lend my help during crunch time, those couple weeks before the final 
release.

Hopefully, that reminder e-mail could also include some other useful 
information, such as:

- The programs that seem to really need help (they have NO docs, they 
haven't even started doing What's This? help or tooltips, their interface 
needs vetting, they're getting tons of bug-reports without much 
substantiation behind them)
- The exact CVS commands to check out the right CVS version, as well as any 
known build issues and workarounds, so all the QA guys are actually doing QA 
on the right program.
- A very simple format in which QA guys should report the issues they find 
(maybe a really good template set, so they could say: "Program: Konqueror, 
Issue: Documentation of Toolbar Editor, Solution: *really long help chunk*"
- How to check which problems have already been noted by other QA people, 
and which programs have been gone over how many times (obviously, that would 
also need a server where QA people could note that they checked something).

So, that last one was a bit too much to hope for, as was the good template 
set, quite likely. I can dream.




I do worry that this idea might result in many potential contributors 
deciding to only contribute before a major release, but I don't think the 
harm would outweigh the benefit. Many, many people just don't have the time 
to really contribute regularly, but could spare a lot of hours for a couple 
of weeks each year. Also, it might encourage people who would otherwise be 
reluctant, as their efforts would directly improve the version of KDE that 
they are about to receive.

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