dotProject

We see infrequent offers of help from members of the user community, mostly asking how they can help, offering to develop dotProject.

There are three major ways in which users of dotProject can help dotProject.

If you're not very technical / don't program / don't know how to create a patch or a code diff - then you can still help out tremendously by running structured / regular testing on dotProject and reporting the bugs you find. When you do this, please provide us with details of the test case that you used to generate the bug. This means that the programmers path to resolution is sped up, and we can grab that test case and add it to the structured testing plans we're trying to write at the moment.

If you are technical, then submitting proposed fixes (via patches or diffs) on the various outstanding Mantis bug reports for the current release will help immensely. We realise that bug fixing isn't the so called "glamorous" end of the development world, but it's the most time-consuming, it's of enormous benefit to the rest of the user community and it's the bit that holds us up from working on the new versions time and time again. And you never know, show some commitment to the project and the Project may invite you to join the dev team (and hence get into the pointy end of the work).

If you don't feel like doing either, then why not submit some test cases so that I can include them in the test plans - (we're using Testlink to write our test plans now and it's great but test plan writing .. and executing for that matter is time consuming). Yes - we will be moving towards automated testing as well - but at this stage we've only ever had test plans written up locally - nothing centralised / formalised.

If you're interested in offering us something like this - some real practical help in the grotty, less seen, less glamorous but immense side of the project, then by all means drop me a line if you want more details (karen at dotproject dot net) or just roll up your sleeves and dive in.