Assigning
QA ownership of Networking bugs
As you can see from our bug totals page, there are a lot of networking bugs, and not many QA testers. Managing this load requires a little bit of help from people that are contributors.
1- If you change the QA on the bug to yourself, please cc the pervious QA owner.
You may have noticed that the two primary testers, tever@netscape.com and benc@netscape.com do not do this, but that is because they both read or watch bugmail for:
benc@netscape.com
tever@netscape.com
httpqa@netscape.com
tever@netscape.com
httpqa@netscape.com
Bugmail watching is done by address, and is an all-or-nothing proposition, so they will not be expanding this to other bugzilla accounts. Please follow this rule. Currently, Tom and Ben are essentially paid to watch the whole component, so we need to know if a bug is re-opened, or there are post-verification comments, etc.
2- You don't need to QA own a bug to VERIFY a bug.
People do this all the time for duplicate, invalid, and works for me. We would also like to see more activity for fixed bugs as well.
Just make sure the correct platforms are tested, and provide a clear explanation of what you did (followed steps, used this site, etc.). Platform==all should be checked on at least one kind of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. If several people verify one platform each, the last verification can be used to set the state to VERIFIED.
Informally, the status whiteboard is using "checkmac, checklinux, checkwin" to note that a verification is still needed for that platform. We hope to migrate to the new bugzilla request system soon.
3- Change the QA when you change the component
If you move bugs into Networking and do not change QA, we will not see it immediately.
If you move bugs out of Networking, then it is not a Networking problem and we do not need the extra bugmail.
4- Some bugs might not be QA transferable
In the long run, there is no reason why contributors cannot take QA ownership of bugs, but there might be some exceptions. This is mostly a hypothetical problem that can be solved when we get there.