Test Plan

*** Introduction ***

The intended audience for this document are anyone who has volunteered to test the v6.0 release of JediMUD and anyone interested in progress. It will be modified through-out the testing process so refer back to it regularly.

*** Getting Started as a Tester ***

First of all thanks for volunteering - may your level gains always be awesome.

Your role as tester has two parts.

1. Rigorously exercising the game features to ensure that they behave as they are intended.

2. Reporting your findings in a way that is useful to the coders and admins.

N.B. the second item is at least as important as the first and the test coordinator will be giving you a hard time if your explanations aren't clear enough. Don't worry though, examples of good bug reports will appear later in this document.

So, where do you start? One approach would be for all the volunteer testers to log in and randomly hack, slash, cast spells and explore in the hope that all the bugs were found. This relatively undisciplined approach *might* find some bugs but it's not particularly efficient, duplicates a lot of effort and requires about a million monkeys (sorry, testers) in order to get any decent amount of test coverage.

Having said that, if your time is limited then it's better than no testing at all.

How we would prefer to address testing is in two ways:

1. New items for test

We will assign items from a list of the significant changes to the game to individuals based on how much time they have to dedicate to testing. Your job is then to go through your items in a structured and rigorous manner ensuring that each item gets as much of a beating as possible. We will assign items on a per test-cycle basis and rotate items between test-cycles so that any single item gets tested by different people over time.

2. Existing bugs requiring test input

For bugs already reported we will tag them with "tester-needed" when they need a tester. You can search for bugs with a tag by selecting Bugs -> Advanced Search. Once you see one you can help out with then change the status to "In Progress" and assigned to to yourself. This will help us track who is working on what.

In general full instructions are included in the bug on what help the tester can provide but if it's not clear then assign back to the test coordinator with a status of "Incomplete".

Once you've done your testing, add comments to the bug and then assign back to the test coordinator with a status of "In Progress".

*** Efficient Testing ***

Here are some suggestions that Kailyn / AP would need to agree to but that would make testing a lot easier. Obviously they would only apply to the test port. Normal policy would apply on the normal port.

1. Multi-ing allowed.
2. A general account would be provided for people to share that was at a wiz level high enough to set stats, purge, reset zones, etc.
3. This one may be impossible but AP, what do you think to allowing people to edit their player files by hand (now that they are text-based) and then ftp them up to the player file directory? I'm not sure how you've structured it but each player file gets its own directory then $HOME for the ftp accounts would only have to provide access to your own player's pfiles. It's kind of fraught with mis-use and mis-formatting possibilities but would certainly make testing a lot easier.

Added by Kailyn 5-21-10: I have no objections to implementing these suggestions, as long as they do indeed only apply to the test port.

*** Testers ***

Added by Kailyn 5-9-2010: List of known test volunteers. Please add to this list as appropriate (including updating incomplete contact info for testers).

Gatt, testing coordinator, launchpad id gatt
James Gamble, Silverking, launchpad id gamrillen. Soon should be reachable at <email address hidden> as well.
Steve Crucitt, Weeds/Weedsy/etc
Kailyn (testing of demi+ commands only, please -- I have enough on my plate already to let others handle most testing!)
Rox, launchpad id mudict
Jam, launchpad id jediguts
Ching, <email address hidden>
Magick
Santa
Anton