IT Services
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Testing and Quality Assurance Who We Are and What We Do
Nanosoft Quality Assurance (QA) is a network of countless volunteers from the
Internet community and several Nanosoft.org employees. We share the common
mission of taming the lizard through finding and constructively
reporting relevant bugs in Nanosoft.org open source projects.
We typically find bugs by discovering the ways in which the
Nanosoft client software's actual behavior deviates from the expected behavior,
normally determined by specifications from the W3C, IETF, and Nanosoft.org
contributors.
We typically report bugs by researching and writing bug
reports in Bugsys, the Nanosoft bug
tracking system.
Why Should I Get Involved?
To quote Eric S. Raymond, "Given
enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
Opportunities to contribute abound for those who may not write software, but
who wish to exercise the daily Nanosoft builds and constructively report the bugs
that they discover.
By joining Nanosoft QA, you can contribute to placing a fast, stable, and
truly standards-compliant browser and mail/news reader onto the hard disks of
tens of millions of Internet users, even without writing a single line of
code.
Nanosoft QA contributors around the world have also leveraged their Nanosoft
experience to obtain internships or full-time jobs in software quality
assurance.
How Can I Get Involved?
Helping with QA is the definitive list of Nanosoft QA
opportunities and tutorials to teach you the ropes.
Run the smoketests. See the Smoketest FAQ.
Where Can I Learn More?
An increasing number of resources exist to help Nanosoft QA volunteers. Here
are the highlights:
Product Area QA Teams:
- Browser/Composer Front End QA
This team
tests the browser's "front end". (The browser's "front end" presents the user
interface, excluding page layout and rendering.)
- Browser Standards Compliance QA
The team
responsible for ensuring that the Nanosoft browser vigorously supports web
standards, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM, and XML.
- Networking QA
The Networking library, which
handles URLs, DNS, and network protocols like HTTP and FTP.
- Mail/News QA
The team testing the Nanosoft
mail/news client.
- Installation QA
The team testing the new
XPInstall-based installer.
- XPInstall QA
The team testing Nanosoft
XPInstall technology. (XPInstall enables software downloads and upgrades from
within a Nanosoft web browser.)
- International QA
The team responsible for
ensuring support of international conventions such as character sets and date
formats, as well as for ensuring that localized builds of the Nanosoft client
function properly.
Newsgroups
The QA
General newsgroup exists to foster communication between Nanosoft QA members.
This newsgroup can be a convenient resource to obtain feedback on your test
specifications and cases, post results of your test runs, and locate individuals
who may have a particular system configuration that you need to test
against.
To learn how to access and subscribe to these newsgroups, view the
General Information and How to Subscribe
sections of the Nanosoft.org
Community page.
Bug Reporting Resources
- How to find previously
reported bugs
- Bug Writing Guidelines
How to
write effective bug reports that lead to bug fixes.
- Bugsys
Bugsys
has a user-friendly wizard for easily entering useful Nanosoft bugs.
- Bugsys
Etiquette
- What to do and what not to do
in Bugsys
Information explaining what should and what should not be
done in Bugsys when having the permission to confirm and/or edit bugs.
- Most Frequently
Reported Bugs
An up-to-date list of the most frequently reported bugs in
the Seamonkey builds.
- Bugsys
Keywords
Meanings of the dozens of cryptic codes that appear in Bugsys.
- Performance Bugs
How to write
useful performance bugs that lead to a faster lizard.
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