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Mozilla Calls on User Community Today for Testing
lisah writes "As Mozilla prepares to release updates for its calendar applications Sunbird and Lightning, project developers are calling on the user community to participate in the final stages of testing. The Mozilla Calendar Team has proclaimed today as Test Case Writing Day and users worldwide are encouraged to participate. Mozilla developer Clint Talbert tells NewsForge that today's event is a pre-cursor to the Calendar Test Day Mozilla will hold later this month prior to the final release of version 0.3."
I like the idea of having the users contribute like this. Something that I really like about Mozilla is the fact that its users are given a big voice. Not all OSS asks for so much input from non-coding users. I always look forward to new releases, too, as the organization seems to wait to release instead of rushing crap.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Is Mozilla going to incorporate automated testing into the project?
Y
Who better to test something then those who will use it. Now of course there are betas and automatic reporting that also help... but there is nothing like the developers asking their users for feedback in a very humble way like this.
It's their way of saying, our software is probably full of holes but with your help we can make it better.
MS tried that with XP and their error reporting feature. From what I understand, their success was amazing with that tool... however I never felt someone say that they felt appreciated for submiting their error reports.
Gotta love companies who realize that it's the users not the software that make their product great. Give users what they want, make them feel like they are appreciated, and most of all respect them; keys to any truely great software (or any other product for that matter). Now if only we could get the RIAA and the rest of the media companies bent on making fair use mean fairly usable to understand what customers want.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Last time I tried a Sunbird supposedly beta release, it was so buggy that is just wasn't useable (at all). It would lose data, scramble it around, crash randomly, use 100% of my processor, etc. I was permanently scared away from Sunbird if that's what they called a beta. I would've loved to use Sunbird, but that was a long time ago, and we've since moved onto Outlook because we 1. were tired of waiting and 2. didn't have anything remotely useable in the meantime.
> Business users will continue to stick with Outlook
Don't be so sure. We're a small mostly-Windows shop (Win/Linux/Mac for developers, Windows for the admin/sales/mktg folks) and we have no M$ servers. Linux-based mail/dns/fileserver infrastructure. Everyone uses Tbird/Ffox, no IE. Outlook doesn't really play well into that kind of environment; so we REALLY need shareable calendars. Right now Chandler & Sunbird aren't far enough along for real business use (at least not a couple of months ago); even event notification was unreliable in Sunbird. iCal is OK but Mac-only. Vista for us is a far-off upgrade.
So at least some of us are very interested in recent Chandler and Sunbird progress.