On Fri, 5 Aug 2005 mental@...3... wrote:
Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 13:43:45 -0400 From: mental@...3... To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Re: [Inkscape-user] Proposal for inkscape-testers
Quoting Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...>:
Presumably each community has a clear and specific leader to steer them in the right direction and make sure there is the necessary cross communication with other groups.
Yes, we will need people to take leadership roles. This tends to happen organically on -devel, although I don't see so much of it on -user yet. I had been hoping we'd see some power users (aside from bulia) emerge and start mentoring the others.
I suppose it needs a clear sense of policy: be nice, answer questions, make suggetions etc.
The it takes one the existing developer leaders to recognise and thank a user for actively answering questions, encourage them and then informally dub them moderator or such-like and ask them to take responsibility for reminding people to follow policy (see above: be nice...) and making sure things get moved to the developer list when needed and whatever else is really needed.
I think this release was unusually rough because of the longer development time. Perhaps the prerelease cycle needs to tuned a little, and the prerelease needs to be out for a while (like a week) without any reported problems before being retagged and rereleasing the same files as the actual release (and I thought this was roughly what was happening already but was a little more rushed this time around for whatever reasons).
Unfortunately part of the problem was that many people decided to wait for the "final" release before trying it out.
\0/
my bad, mea cupla, guilty as charged!
(that ascii art is is me with my hands up in the air ;)
downloading the latest 0.42.x test release now...
Which is a consequence of normal human psychology, I think. I'm not sure how to encourage users to "take the grenade" of the prereleases. Maybe encouraging a testing community, as such, could help.
A quick short list of "smoke tests" which I think mozilla had/has might help.
Maybe a web form
Username [ ] Inkscape [version] Platform [ ]
Test 1 [/] [ Comment ] Test 2 [/] [ Comment ] Test 3 [/] [ Comment ]
[Submit]
or summink like that to make feedback more visible and have a graph/chart generate from it?
Ideally I would like to see a deliberate usability review of some form take place as part of every release cycle.
Yes. All for that.
If enough Developers lurk and occasionally respond to issues on the testing list it could work.
Yeah. I think all the core developers should be subscribed to the testing list, at least.
Hope this testing list works out.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/