Tips for QA
------------

From time to time, we'll ask the community for help testing a new alpha release
or a release candidate. Normally, we'll offer a link for the download of a
self-contained bundle just for internal testing purposes. These will be updated
quite often, as soon as there are fixes available to fix the release-critical
bugs.

If you want to give a hand in this process, please follow the following tips:

- Focus all your efforts, if possible, on whatever is *the* golden distro at
  the time of the release.  This currently is: Ubuntu 14.04.x LTS, 64bits, with
Unity as the default desktop environment.
  It's very important to have a reference environment as bug-free as possible,
  before trying to solve issues that are present in other distributions or window
  managers.
- Identify all issues that need help in the QA phase. You can do that going to
  the bug tracker, and filtering all the issues for a given release that are in
  the QA state.
- If the issue is solved in your tests for this alpha release, please add a
  comment to the issue stating the results of your tests, and the platform and
  desktop environment in which your tests took place.  But please do not change
  the QA status on the issue. We generally leave this role to the author of the
  original issue, or to the person playing the role of the release QA master.
- Always test with a newly created account (specially relevant when testing
  email candidates)
- Always test with the reference Mail User Agent (currently, Thunderbird, in
  whatever version is present in the reference distribution).
- Remove also any thunderbird configuration, start a freshly configured account.
- If you find a new bug, please make sure that it hasn't already been reported
  in the issue tracker. If you are absolutely certain that you have found a new
  bug, please attach a log of a new bitmask session, which should contain
  *only* the behaviour needed to reproduce the bug you are reporting.

