Testcases for Ares 0.2

[SoundMachine]

Hello everyone!

With this topic I would like to ask if there are some solid test cases that need to be tested for the ''ready to test'' brances. Basicly I am looking for bugs that are 'fixed' but need to be verified.

If I may be honest, the bugtracker is really hard to understand at a first glimpse and it does not really describe testable scenarios for me, just a list of bugs that needs to be fixed.

I hope I can provide some help!

Regards,
SoundMachine

P.S: Please don't go hard on me since this is my first post and I only want to help

[Nighthawk]

Hello SoundMachine. Here's a quick rundown of what the statuses on Launchpad's bugtracker mean:

On the left hand side is the priority of a bug. Should be obvious what that means - important things are high, lessly-important things are lower.

On the right hand side is the status of a reported bug. There are a few of these:

• New - this bug has only just been reported or has not been officially investigated yet.
  
• Opinion - the existence of this bug is currently under debate.
  
• Confirmed - it is officially acknowledged that this is a bug, but no action has yet been taken.
  
• In Progress - the developers are currently working (or will in the near future) to fix this bug.
  
• Fix Committed - a possible fix for this bug has currently been committed to Ares.
  
• Fix Released - this bug is confirmed by testing as being fixed.
  
• Incomplete - more information is needed before this can be investigated properly.
  
• Invalid - this is not a bug in Ares.
  
• Expired - this bug has not seen activity from either the reporter or the developers for so long that it has expired from the tracker.
  
• Won't Fix - either it's not possible to fix this bug, or this is used as a catch-all status for "removed" tracker items.

Any current bugs that have been fixed and need verified should be under the "Fix Committed" heading. However, we also need to investigate the general stability of Ares - how various features interact, whether the game throws a tantrum if you use a certain combination of stuff, and so on. If you encounter such issues, check to see if they've been reported, and if they haven't, report them yourself. At the moment, there aren't many untested specific bugs left - stability testing is the major thing that needs dealt with.

Lastly, if you can confirm to us that things are working as they should be, then also let us know about that too. This doesn't go on the bugtracker, and instead goes in a LaunchPad question topic here.

Later Edit: This is more for existing testers rather than you, SoundMachine, but if you've been using our old tracker, this could apply to you too.
For any major fans of the original tracker, the new statuses are slightly different to the old ones, but here's how they relate:

• Old Mantis Status = New LaunchPad Status
  
• New = New.
  
• Feedback = Incomplete or Opinion depending on the situation.
  
• Acknowledged = Confirmed.
  
• Confirmed = Confirmed or In Progress depending on development.
  
• Assigned = In Progress.
  
• Resolved = Fix Committed.
  
• Closed = Fix Released or Invalid or Expired or Won't Fix depending on the situation.
  

[Renegade]

@SoundMachine:
There still haven't been secondary confirmations/answers to the questions on the list of 0.2 test branch questions to answer. It would be much appreciated if you could look into that.

As for general testing, as well as the question of why a list of "testable scenarios" is missing, please see this previous post by me.

While the sentiment expressed in that post regarding lists of things to test remains the same, that does not mean that we're opposed to structured testing.
Feel free to take the lead and come up with an organized approach. The more people you can mobilize, the better. Nighthawk can create a mailing list for the Ares Testing Corps if one is needed, and there's an Ares wiki at github.

Ultimately, though, if I may be honest, I don't see how the bug tracker is "really hard to understand"... It's a bug tracker. It tracks bugs. You go to it, it shows you a list of bugs. If you want to see more bugs, there's a search box at the top and pagination at the bottom. You have sort controls and the ability to filter by status or tag at the right, and "Report a bug" is, in bold, within the first 200px of the page.
To see a bug's details, click on its title.

Is there any problem in particular you're having?

@Nighthawk:
Your status-explanations are unfortunately incorrect:

• Acknowledged is not identical to Confirmed - Confirmed states the report has been confirmed, whereas Acknowledged only stated that someone from the team had seen them. Acknowledged has no equivalent on LP and was autoconverted to New.
  
• Feedback is equivalent to Incomplete, period. Opinion is an entirely different status, best explained through the words of LP itself:
  

  [...] It is not uncommon on Launchpad to have a bug that deals with an issue that a developer cannot resolve. In Launchpad, we offer a couple of bug statuses that allow a developer to close a bug report without actually doing what is requested in the report: these are Won’t Fix and Invalid.
  
  Often, though, there may still be a discussion. Won’t Fix and Invalid are useful for the developer, and the project, to know that they don’t need to schedule time for a fix. However, they can sometimes — rightly or wrongly — be seen as an attempt to close down to discussion.
  [...]
  Opinion says: there’s a difference of opinion around this bug and people are free to continue the discussion, but the project or package maintainers need to move to other work and are considering the issue closed.

• Expired bugs are fundamentally the reporter's fault, not the developers'. The primary defining characteristic of an expired bug is that it has been in "Incomplete" state for a long time. It has nothing to do with lack of activity over a long time, but with lack of information over a long time. Quoth Launchpad:

  Launchpad consider bugs ready for expiry if it appears that they have been abandoned. It considers a bug to be abandoned if:

  • it has the "Incomplete" status
    
  • the last update was more than 60 days ago
    
  • it is not marked as a duplicate of another bug
    
  • it has not been assigned to anyone
    
  • it is not targeted to a milestone.
    

  Basically, if there's not enough information to start working on a bug, and there's no sign it's being dealt with anyway, and it just sits there, it expires.
  If the reporter just went ahead and provided more information, it wouldn't expire.
• Won't fix means exactly what it says...which issues are using it otherwise?

See also

• On LP bug statuses
  
• On Opinion in particular
  
• Bug expiry