Thunderbird:Testing
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You can help other users, or help make Thunderbird better and enjoy the satisfaction that you have contributed to improving Thunderbird - no prior experience is necessary.
Below are just a few ways you can contribute to the Quality of Thunderbird. Each item has a specific page with more details.
Easy: Testing
This activity is simple, takes the least amount of time, and doesn't require any special skill.
The text below was moved from Thunderbird:Testing/Testing
Punctual testing
This may be the easiest way to participate, learn how to do more - and get more confident about helping. To help here, just subscribe yourself to the Thunderbird-testers mailing list. This is a read-only mailing list with 1-2 messages per month. We usually send detailed instructions on what to do and test and how to get help when you sign up for one of those events.
Once on the mailing list just read the emails coming in. They'll either ask for volunteers for a shared event or will give very specific instructions on how to test a new feature on which we want a lot of coverage. When we ask for volunteers we'll usually use the following tools for testing :
Having accounts on both on these systems is needed in order to participate.
Finding regressions
While testing you might find some portions of Thunderbird that used to work, but do not work anymore. These are called regressions.
Daily testing
To participate in this effort, you'll need to run a version different from the standard release version of Thunderbird linked on the mozilla.com website.
Daily testing is can be done with "newer" versions of Thunderbird that needs testing. Mozilla produces updates of these versions of Thunderbird every night, with new fixes, but also sometimes causing new bugs.
- We need many people on the stable branch - as its name implies, the stable branch only contains fixes and doesn't see any new features. But by using these builds, you'll help make sure that we don't introduce new bugs in the next security and stability release. To use these, either:
- Download one stable nightly build and update it regularly
- Or switch your update channel to beta instead of release.
- We also need people to use Alphas and Betas of the next major release. To run these just download one when they are announced and just keep using them.
- And finally we also need people to run trunk builds. These builds will contain all the new features of the next major release of Thunderbird and you don't need to wait for the next beta to see them. These builds are less stable than the others and get broken once in a while (I would say maybe once or twice per calendar year).
- We also announce major issues when we are aware of them on planning list at Thunderbird discussion.
When doing daily testing, you will want to have an account on Bugzilla, so you can report the issues you find.
Maintaining the Test cases
A main part of our manual and community driven testing relies on test cases .<ref name="testcase">https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Test_case</ref>. What we do is we publish a call for help from volunteers and then split the test cases between those volunteers.
This means :
- Adding tests
- Editing tests
- Removing obsolete tests
Not too technical, but a good level of English is needed.
Moderate: Maintaining the bug database
The bug database aka Bugzilla is the tool used track defects. The bug database is open to anyone who wants to help developers know about issues with Thunderbird.
Work in this area requires some experience just using Thunderbird (just a few months), and the ability to determine what the user reporting a problem might be seeing. You don't need great technical skill. It just takes a little time.
More information on this activity can be found here.
Ask questions on Matrix
If you want to know more, ask in the Thunderbird support topic #thunderbird:mozilla.org on Matrix. Bear in mind volunteers may not respond immediately, so please be patient.
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