Thunderbird:Testdays

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Welcome to the Thunderbird Test Day wiki!

With help from the Thunderbird / Mozilla Messaging team, join us to test Thunderbird. We also invite you to inform yourself via Thunderbird wiki pages about the state of Thunderbird, version 3, and how you might help improve this great messaging platform. We also run bugdays, in which you can participate and help plan via Planning for bugdays.

Who

You, and others interested in the future of Thunderbird.

No coding, (almost*) no experience required, no heartache. Anyone can participate and be a valuable contributor. And there are people available to assist you. You must however run code which is development status. * It will help if you have used Thunderbird for 2-3 months.

Why

Test days are about assessing how good a specific version of Thunderbird is for a population of users larger than the core of people involved in coding the fixes and improvements. A larger population is essential because a diverse set of testers on a diverse set of computers is required to ferret out enough problems, which are ... themselves diverse. Testing the code also helps find its weaknesses, and confirms its strengths.

Currently there are lots (LOTS!) of bugs - some of which we evaluate during Bug Days. We invite you to join us on bug days which occur every Thursday. Bug days are designed to help newcomers in the process of cleaning up the database and drive down the line in this chart.

Schedule

Multiple staffed sessions allow you to participate during the evening or during daytime at any location in the world. You may attend any or all sessions as they wish. If you can't attend a scheduled session please drop in between sessions - someone might be hanging out who can help you. If you can't participate in today's bugday, we invite you to participate in a future Test Day. Or, work on any bug any day or time - see Where about getting help.

Click in a UTC link below to get the session start time for your point on the globe.

	Sessions
Timezone	Session 1 13h-15h UTC	Session 2 19h-21h UTC	Session 3 02h-05h UTC
Los Angeles, USA   (PDT=UTC-8+1)	Thu 06h-08h	Thu 12h-14h	Thu 19h-22h
New York, USA   (EDT=UTC-5+1)	Thu 09h-11h	Thu 15h-17h	Thu 22h-01h
São Paulo, Brazil   (UTC-4+1)	Thu 10h-12h	Thu 16h-18h	Thu 23h-02h
UK   (BST)	Thu 14h-16h	Thu 20h-22h	Fri 03h-06h
Berlin, Germany   (CEST=UTC+1+1)	Thu 15h-17h	Thu 21h-23h	Fri 04h-07h
Moscow, Russia   (UTC+3+1)	Thu 17h-19h	Thu 23h-01h	Fri 06h-09h
Beijing, China   (UTC+8)	Thu 21h-23h	Fri 03h-04h	Fri 10h-13h

Where

You can get help on bug day in IRC channel #testday. Prior to the scheduled date you can get help on preparing by asking in #maildev.)

• Get an IRC client:
  • Windows clients
  • MacOS clients
  • Linux clients
  • ChatZilla (Firefox extension)
• Connect to irc.mozilla.org
• Join the channel #testday

How

(HOW IS NOT YET REVISED for testday)

If at any point you have a question, encounter a problem, or are not familiar with our bug tracking system (bugzilla) post a note in the IRC channel.

If you are new to bugzilla you won't be able to change most bug fields, but you can add a comment to a bug detailing what should be changed and why. You can also make your comments known in the #bugday channel and someone will assist you.

(optional) See Bug triage about how to get upgraded privileges to change bug fields.

1. Get an account - easily created at bugzilla account.
2. Get a build - "Trunk" refers to builds of Thunderbird 3 (currently in heavy development) -- it's where most bugs will get fixed and where we normally attempt to reproduce bugs that people have reported. See "Versions to test" below for details.
3. Pick bugs - current bugday "Focus" offers suggestions about which bugs to work on.
4. Protect - Bbackup your data and consider using a test profile if bugs might cause dataloss.
5. Work bugs - For UNCONFIRMED bugs, you should attempt to replicate the problem specified in the bug report, and mark as "confirmed" if you are able to replicate and the steps to reproduce are well documented and easily followed and the problem exists in trunk build. If you are not running trunk but can replicate with current release, please comment but do not confirm. If you are running trunk and cannot replicate, you might close it dupe, WFM, INVALID, or perhaps the issue is not easily reproduced.

   Other helpful steps include:

   • • Clarify bug reports without distorting or changing the original problem.
     • Change the summary to be more accurate to the problem being reported, and if appropriate remove words so summary is less chatty
     • Close bug reports as WORKSFORME, INVALID, or INCOMPLETE when it's appropriate to do so (see status descriptions to find out what is appropriate)].
     • Ask bug reporter in a bug comment to provide missing information that will help to replicate and ultimately fix the bugs they report.
     • Remember to cite what version(s) of Thunderbird you are using.
6. Give feedback (see feedback heading below)

Please check these for more helpful information:

• Thunderbird Bug triage - expert tips, extensions, reference documents
• Bug Writing Guidelines describes writing of effective bug reports that lead to bug fixes.

Versions to test: If you can, please test with Nightly Trunk Builds. If you are not permitted to use trunk, then use the latest update of Thunderbird version 2 - currently 2.0.0.12. You can install a trunk build or any release of Thunderbird, and not disturb your production setup by a) using custom install to specify a directory of your choosing, and b) using profile manager to create a test profile.

Give us feedback

Please post a note in #testday or #maildev about your experience: problems, questions, ideas to improve documentation, where you learned about testday, and overall thoughts about Thunderbird. We really appreciate your help today and your feedback is very valuable.

Thanks!

Thanks so much for your help. Your efforts help us to improve Thunderbird. We could never do this without you and the entire volunteer community.