[Scummvm-devel] Bring testers to the team?

Travis Howell kirben at optusnet.com.au
Tue Jul 14 04:28:45 CEST 2009


Walter van Niftrik wrote:
> Travis Howell wrote:
>> Eugene Sandulenko wrote:
>>   
>>> There was a quite sound idea mentioned recently, that is bring "full
>>> time" testers to the team.
>>>
>>> What do you think guys?
>>>     
>> No, I think it is far better to stick with the more varied testing 
>> offered by public testing for each release cycle, even if we struggle to 
>> get full testing each time around.
>>   
> 
> If we add testers to the team that doesn't mean we need to stop public
> testing. ;)

I know, I just meant it offers more disadvantages than advantages, 
compared to our public testing.

> Another point is that only testing before releases isn't exactly ideal
> for engines under heavy development. Taking SCI as an example, we're
> making extensive changes right now and our testing is virtually
> non-existent. OTOH, I get the impression from users on IRC and the
> forums that quite a few people are actively testing SCI games to see how
> we progress. Some of those people might be willing to help us out.

People are playing through games under ScummVM SVN all the time, so we 
generally get most regressions reported. In the past not all ports have 
offered frequent snapshots (or snapshots for release cycle), which made 
it difficult to tell when ports specific issues occur.

Unsupported games (ie SCI games) are a different issue, as we currently 
don't accept bug reports until games are officially supported. In the 
case of SCI games, it might be worth adding sticking topic on forums, 
for people to mention regressions noticed, until we accept bug reports 
for SCI games.

> Anyway, let me generalize my original point. I think we should make it
> possible for people to join the ScummVM team if they want to help out in
> areas like testing, documentation, maintaining the website, etc, even if
> they have no programming skills whatsoever.

It already it possible to join the ScummVM project, to help with many 
non-programming tasks. We are only discussing expanding this, to include 
play testers.




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