[Testing] Testing resources of the week

[Mel Chua]

Oh! I realized I didn't send out the Learning Testing Links from last 
week - so here they are. They're all short this week.

The first one is something I've been thinking a lot about especially 
with recent discussions about the design of our testing infrastructure - 
I think a lot of what I've been trying to communicate lately is that we 
*are* designing it, here, together. Good practices aren't automatic; we 
have to try things we think will work, see if they do, and tweak them so 
they'll be better. A lot of things are missing, and a lot of things 
could be working better, and we /are/ improving, week by week.

Sometimes things are confusing or don't make sense or don't exist, not 
by design or by deliberate exclusion, but because nobody's gotten around 
to fixing (or realizing) it yet. I've been very encouraged to see so 
many people finding problems, articulating them, and then stepping up 
with their own solutions (like the smoke testing spreadsheet/form, 
running test sprints, putting up semantic mediawiki tables...) - that's 
exactly the kind of initiative-taking we need, and the kind of thing 
I've been trying really hard to encourage. How can we get more of it to 
happen?

It seems to me that our process is currently very stigmergic (which I 
personally like). I would describe stigmergy as "The process of 
communicating about something (in this case, our testing process) by 
modifying that something." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy (the 
related resources are pretty cool). We do a lot of this - I'm not sure 
how conscious of it we are.

</soapbox>

More "normal" testing resources follow. :) First up is OLPC's 
development workflow in Trac, as written by Michael. 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Trac_ticket_workflow

And a few things on writing up good bug reports - which is a huge part 
of bug advocacy. If developers produce code, then testers produce bug 
reports. (That's one view, anyway. Of course, developers also produce a 
lot of things, like tools to make code, hosting infrastructures, 
documentation, mailing list traffic... testers make things other than 
bug reports too, but it's one take on our "basic unit of productivity.")

General resource (I've posted this here before, but I think we have some 
new people now): http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

Some other projects' bug reporting guidelines:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/How_to_write_a_good_bug_report
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Bug_writing_guidelines

Thanks, everyone. Have a wonderful holiday season!

--Mel