I need to fix the sidebar links on my public weblog - they are picking up the values for the main upstream site, rather than this category-specific site. My guess is that the best way to fix it quickly is to change the templates.  10:42:18 AM    

[Elena S] Here's a good article on bug repoting.

http://www.testingcraft.com/failure-improvement.html

I also came accross another interesting article about software testing which I have listed below.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000067.html ; 10:26:34 AM    

[Peter] http://www.sqatester.com/bugsfixes/index.htm

Here's my comments about it:

I like how it talks about how others view the bug report...how managers and others might not print out the whole bug report and only the headline (ie when they have a bug report meeting), so it says that writing a good headline is important.

And how it says the better you write the bug report, the less questions people will ask you later (from the developer trying to fix/reproduce the bug, to other QA engineers trying to verify the fix).

And it also mentions that even if you can't reproduce a bug, developers may still be able to track down the bug if the description is good enough.

Also contains links to other "QA helpful" pages and a link to bug reporting components.

I also like how the other articles go into what you should do when closing a bug.  10:25:54 AM    

[Elena K] http://www.gerbilbox.com/newzilla/mozilla/involved03.php

This article pertains closely to our bug filing process because it is the same bug-tracking tool (bugzilla). Of course, since our bugzilla has been modified in certain respects, the fields may vary as well as some wording such as the levels of severity.

Links are given to examples of particulars in the bug reports. These examples cover many of the fields that we use in our bug reporting process (and more). Also, next to each field is a link to an explanation so the user can get more advice about what information needs to go there. There is not a lot of detail in the explanations, but bugzilla does not require a lot because it is fairly clear to use.  10:24:44 AM    

[shiv] An online version of Cem Kaner's slides on bug advocacy is at http://www.testingcraft.com/bug-advocacy-kaner.pdf.

Bugzilla itself has some guidelines for bug writing.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/bugwritinghelp.html

A very useful article wrt bugzilla would be http://bugs.helixcode.com/bug-HOWTO.html

An article using the divide-and-conquer approach http://www.metronet.com/~drf/IWORKS98/defect_isol.pdf . This article is good in narrowing down the steps necessary to reproduce the bug.Covers only software defect isolation.Could emphasize more on defective tracking.For a very good article on defect tracking however (very handy for software managers ) this article http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/CrossTalk/1995/may/Metrics.asp makes interesting reading.It also correlates with the graphs Joe and co. were talking about Indices to measure the success of our group.   10:22:49 AM    

[Joe] I have a autographed copy of Cem Kaner's book "Testing Computer Software" in my office. There is a good section "Further Thoughts on Problem Reporting". I found it and the entire book very informative during my transition from development into testing. It gave me an understanding of why test groups do some of the things they do and helped me to re-adjust my expectations of what test groups can do. As a developer I expected that the test group could test 100% of the system (every build) and were supermen. I was often disappointed.

  10:21:42 AM    

I asked:

Task: find a bug-writing guideline doc somewhere out on the web, and mail the url to the group. extra credit: write a critique of the doc, specifically how well it could apply to our situation.

I submitted:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

written more for a user of a non-embedded system, the guidelines do apply to our situation. does not cover how to categorize a bug (what priority), or how to narrow down the steps necessary to reproduce. could emphasize concise and precise a bit more.

The next few entries will be the responses I received  10:20:41 AM    

Ok - the last post only went to my ftp server. Now this post should go to radio.weblogs.com

(I've set up www/#upstream.xml to use ftp, but left www/categories/weblogs.com/#upstream.xml alone.)  6:00:59 AM    

Whoops! I created some stories, and they were upstreamed! That was not what I was expecting.

Time to post a message on the discussion boards.  5:42:35 AM    

It worked! The images are there (and the title is no longer the category name - hmmm).

Now I can set up www/#upstream.xml to ftp to my work server. I'll set up different categories - one for each separate topic - and route new postings accordingly.

WIBNI (wouldn't it be nice if) there were some way, using radio, to make sub-categories of the weblogs.com category, so that I could have separate category weblogs on separate servers, administered through one instance of radio . . .   5:34:12 AM    

Wow - it worked, sort of. The images are missing. But past experience has shown me that I jsut need to wait a bit, and they will show up.  5:29:02 AM    

Step 6 - Click on Publish (since I've been clicking on Post for the time being)  5:26:56 AM    

Step 5 - move www/#upstream.xml to www/categories/weblogs.com/#upstream.xml, and copy www/system/#upstreal.xml to www/#upstream.xml  5:25:41 AM    

step 4 - edit each post (all 5 of them - this is #6) and select the weblogs.com category  5:22:42 AM    

Step 3 - create a new category, named weblogs.com, with the render checkbox selected.  5:21:17 AM    

step 2 - delete the default categories  5:20:22 AM    

Now I'm going to try to transition my upstream settings. Step 1 - turn on categories  5:19:37 AM    

Well, that was quite an adventure. I must have uninstalled and reinstalled RU8 a dozen times.

A saving grace - importing subscriptions

I had saved my old mySubscriptions.opml file from 7.0, thinking I could cut-n-paste from it into the subscription "add" box. But then I found the Radio->Utilities->Import subscriptions. That, combined with the pref that sets all checkboxes to checked in the aggregator, made the process bearable.

Oh, I tried lots of combinations of upstream settings (where are the radio.macros.xxx calls documented? I'd like to know if there is an equivalent for weblogUrl that would take the category home page rather than the main blog home page).

Looks like there was a server error during the time I was playing, and for some reason my wifi connection kept dropping. Plus, I ended up with a corrupt Radio.root at some point.

I'm quite stunned that, after all that, I still like Radio 8.0. It must be pretty darn good.

  5:04:47 AM    

Oof. I'm here, finally.  4:12:11 AM