Get ready for 4.3 release testing !

[pdelbar]

As you must have heard, the 4.3 release is getting close to making its first appearance. In the next weeks, a first alpha release will be made available for those strong of heart and stomach. As with every major effort, there will be many issues with new and rewritten pieces of code, added features or completely new extensions such as CiviAccounts. There's no easy way to weed them out -- we'll all have to find them, analyze them, fix them and make CiviCRM 4.3 the best release yet !

I'm inviting everyone to set up a BugHunt event in the next weeks or months. The ideal timing will be fixed in sync with the release schedule. The objective of a bughunt is to

• install the new release
• play around with it and note all the quirks in what you consider 'normal use' of CiviCRM
• test the new functionality
• find as many things which you think are not working and document them

What makes an open source community great, is the fact that every member can contribute. It doesn't matter whether you are a beginner or a lifelong user, a mere Contacts guy or an Events Supermama : if you can sit down at a computer screen and use CiviCRM, you can make 4.3 better !

And to make it even more fun, invite friends and colleagues to join you and make it into a happening. I've seen beautiful friendships start at bughunts, and even a marriage or two.

So if you're up for some serious bughunting, please respond to this post. We'll work out the practicalities later.

[petednz]

Yep nice idea - happy to be part of a virtual bug hunt day

[Jeroen~]

Very good idea!
I like to participate in this if I'm able.

[xavier]

Hi,

One think we often realise too late is the "special cases" and less often used features and components. One good test is to migrate (a copy of course) of your real data and see how it goes with your custom fields an weird memberships and funky templates....

Otherwise if you test, it's often useful to have more than the handful of contacts, I'd suggest you to configure and run this tool
https://github.com/tttp/civi-charlatan

and who knows, providing a few scripts to generate activities and other entities...

Happy testing!

X+

[bzaller]

Sign me up!

As we have QuickBooks 'in the cloud' up and running well, and this is a new instance of CiviCRM that we're bringing up, now is the time to kick the tires fervently.  Please let me know how I can help do that, and contribute to an 'even better' 4.3 release.

[pdelbar]

Thanks for stepping up. Everlasting glory will be bestowed upon you.

We're working out the details of the testing process, so bear with us. You can take a peek at the current proposal at http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/4.3+Release+Testing+Proposal.

[kharding]

I'd happily participate as well.

[magnolia61]

Please sign me up. I would love to help out testing :-)

[pdelbar]

Thanks for stepping up ! Here's a little intro about what you can do :

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/pages/worddav/preview.action?fileName=CiviCRM_4_3_Release_Testing_Explained.pdf&pageId=79364296

[mcgeehon]

I'd like to help as well.  We would like to upgrade a copy of our site to 4.3 and have our staff run it through its paces.

[ken]

Count me in. Of course my degree of involvement depends on the release schedule and other commitments.

[petednz]

WHat do others think about actually setting a day when we will drop tools and do some testing? May be a series of dates.

But I do think it helps to name a date and have people say - YES

[pdelbar]

@petednz : I'ld like to comment on your suggestion to set a date.

The reason to have multiple alpha/beta releases is to allow people to test early or late, little or much, but mostly whenever they have the time. The initial release (alpha 1) is released when the core team has covered all critical and most of the important issues, to allow people to look into the new release and catch the 'big ones' they have not found themselves (by testing manually or in automated testing runs). The objective is to have as much overlap between the release cycle converging on a GA (generally available) release, and the user testing. If we all start testing only once the devs have done what they can find, there'll be a huge bump in issues coming up, and there will be a strong need for a 4.3.1.

Of course, not every kind of user testing should be done with alpha 1. If you plan to spend a few hours doing an upgrade of a complex setup, you may want to schedule that near the beta stage. However, alpha stage is the moment of choice to experiment with new and improved features, two areas with lots of code changes and therefore much risk on issues.

In general, the date to start testing is 'from now until GA'

However, there is one idea that we have talked about. Would you (and the community) be interested in one or more specific bug hunts on specific dates, where lots of people join for an intense day of testing, perhaps even physically in one room, with pizza and beer ? Let's hear your opinions !

[Donald Lobo]

I think what peted was suggesting was one (or more specific days), where we do a bunch of testing as a big group and coordinate on IRC / forums.

Think if it as CiviDay, but remote and for testing, i.e.CiviTestDay.

While we do want people to test from now until GA, this might be another alternative way to get more folks to test the release either locally or on the sandbox. Considering how very distributed we are doing it physically might be hard (though meetups in feb/mar should probably have it on their agenda)

lobo

[pdelbar]

Signup sheet : http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/4.3+Release+%3A+Community+Testing+Signup+Sheet