Proposals about gnucash-gnome2

[Josh Sled]

On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 17:21 -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> Been lurking lately and wonder what is involved in testing and how can I 
> help? I'm a daily user running three businesses with gnucash and have 
> some very ancient programming experience. If I can help out by testing 
> and (hopefully) giving useful feedback, I'd be happy to do it.

- side-by-side comparisons of 1.8 and G2 looking for bugs, differences 
  and regressions.  This can happen at any point... including now so we 
  have a good handle on how much work is left.  Anything noted should 
  go into GNOME2_STATUS (rather than bugzilla).

- a canonical set of test data files would be invaluable as people come 
  on board and want to test or report issues.  While we also want to 
  encourage people to use their own, real, data to expose the code to 
  variety, it's nice to have a known set of data to share, reproduce, 
  converse-about and synchronize against.

  My ideal version of these files would include the minimum number of 
  cases to test every feature, account-type, default- and 
  secondary-commodity, reconciliation scenario, and situation.  
  Obviously this is impractical, but we can at least hit the major ones 
  pretty easily.

  We'd also want a set of fairly regular data to test reporting, 
  balance-computation, &c.  One could probably script-generate some QIF 
  transactions to import (or maybe an XML datafile directly) or get 
  creative with their system clock and the scheduled transactions, to 
  create a year's worth of data with computable properties (all 
  expenses should sum to $20,000; the Expenses:Rent should have 12 txns 
  of $1000 ea., &c.)

- test instructions or scripts for other/new people to execute against 
  in different environments... including us. :)  Especially with all 
  the UI work done, we're going to need to test actually stepping 
  through a set of interactions with the UI to make sure things work as 
  expected.  The other side is that if people are stepping through the 
  same set of instructions, you're only testing that one path through 
  the UI and missing other cases... but I still think there's value 
  here.

...jsled
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