Bitcoin Forum

Testing changes to Bitcoin-Qt continues to be a chronic problem, and as alternative implementations of Bitcoin start to mature testing to make sure that they interoperate correctly and don't harm the network will become a big problem.

Therefore, I'm creating a decentralized, transparent organization using the BetterMeans (http://bettermeans.com/front/index.html) system. I'll need help from people willing to be fundraisers, testers, project managers, toolmakers, troll-catchers, etc.

I'll create and hold a secure wallet that will be used for donations (at least until the project gets mature enough to turn over that responsibility to somebody else), but we'll use the BetterMeans "Credits" system so that everybody working on the project collaboratively decides who gets what, and what the priorities aught to be.

So: it is easy to talk about stuff like this, who's willing to help make it happen?  Send me an email at gavinandresen@gmail.com if this sounds like a project you'd like to help with, describing what you think the highest priorities for the project aught to be, how you could contribute, how much time you could contribute per week, and any relevant prior experience.

I'll help out!

I think most of what I'll be able to do is bug reporting and fundraising. Let me know when you get the donations wallet set up!

I setup the wallet this afternoon, the donation address was:  (defunct address, don't send coins...)

Great!
I can audit the security of the new source code added from now on, and try to find vulnerabilities in the source code already written. This proposal is related to the one in https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=79830.0

What can I do ?

Are there some bounties or something ?

So as the maintainer of stable bitcoind/Bitcoin-Qt series (0.4.x and 0.5.x), how do I participate in getting the RCs out to testers?

My about-every-month next-test combination builds should also continue to help to bring pullreq testing to common Windows users.

E-mail and bitcoins sent!

Good idea. Bounties for testing makes a change to the frosty reception testers have received prior ... just saying.

Edit: also proposed previously to create a #bitcoin-test irc separate to #bitcoin-dev to enable more focus, cogent threads, etc. Might be worth looking at now.

I would love to help out.  I have a specialist qa background, (automation, fuzzing, runtime analysis, etc) I also have worked in govt crypto and have manage qa departments.

I will send a more detailed email.

@luke-jr  I am sure with a coherant qa stratergy and test life cycle there is more than enough testing to go around.  it just needs to be managed. 

I have sent an email to gavin offering to help, lets see where we end up :)

Thank you both for your continued hardwork on this project. It is appreciated.

(btw i love testing! and the whole shebang :D )

cheers,
steve (not kev)

I sent a coin! :)

Longtime lurker, this seems a worthy cause.
sending coins.

@luke-jr : I don't want to start an argument, but I still think we don't have enough testing resources to support 4 releases. I think we need to establish good QA for the main Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind release before we worry about next-test or so-called-"stable" releases.

That's a good discussion for the Testing Project team to have, though, once it gets up and running a little more.

I'd also like the Testing Project to not get pigeonholed into "QA testing for Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind", but to tackle cross-implementation compatibility (which I think is the next big, critical issue).

For those interested, check out the dashboard at https://secure.bettermeans.com/projects/4180

Bettermeans looks like a really cool system, check out their videos if you're interesting in helping out / bounties / making some money.

bump this

Over 50 BTC in donations with no fundraising effort-- thanks everyone who has donated so far!
 

Joined

this BetterMeans system is pretty cool, come check it out

https://secure.bettermeans.com/projects/4180

This is good. Will be interesting when the Mt. Gox, Bitcoinica, BitInstant, Intersangos, etc who are basing businesses on the bitcoin s/ware platform realise some QA and testing is essential ...

I don't have the time for this now, but I'd love to help out in the future.

$36K USD was issued to mining operators over the past  day, and $36K USD will be issued to them tomorrow, and the day after (more or less, depending on the exchange rate).   The $1+ million per-month mining industry is Bitcoin's biggest and most profitable, by far.  They are just as dependent on Bitcoin software succeeding as any.   An appeal to them might yield some funds.

And maybe if block chain pruning, for instance, becomes a higher priority feature (or to raise the soft per-block data size limits) perhaps SatoshiDICE might find it useful to kick in to help with that testing.  

It would be great if someone would publish a ubuntu 11.10/12.04 howto for Better Means

Hi,

This was on my todo list (along with writing some testcases) the main discussion page should help you out a bit, but now I can type again (rsi and carpal tunnel) I intend to get things moving quite quickly. (thank you thermoskin!)

Bettermeans itsself looks quite good, but it does have some annoying bugs, and it not under that much active development (they have open sourced it though)  So I am trying to keep a copy of everything on the wiki, so for the 0.7 release all the testcases will appear on the wiki first then as bettermeans tasks.

https://secure.bettermeans.com/projects/4256/wiki

This is just incase bettermeans turns out not to be as good as it looks.  I can easially migrate info from the wiki to mantis bug tracker, alternative testcase managment and alternative testing workflow managment.

What would you like the guide to cover?

Hurm, it seems bettermeans wont email you like it claims when new stuff is added so please keep checking back.

Also not a lot of the wiki is stiched together, so please check the page index's as well as the links.  for example there is a lot of content on the main wiki with the dev_ prefix.

Cheers,
Steve

I support this project.Sent an email.

What do people think of bettermeans ?

I think I have tried, and given it a go... but bettermeans seems utter shit now

it has lost a shed load of work I had done (although I think this might be my fault), who knows, I cant get any backups off the site, it only half works now, with meta tags appearing all over the place.

I would like to change the setup if others are in agreement.

I would like to build a soultion around Mantis Bug Tracker, It is a great bit of kit, with a number of plugins that will provide the 'lack of leadership, leadership' that bettermeans seemed to be so good for at the start.

I feel that I can put something better together, something that at least works. (from everything to bug logging, documentation, test setups, test runs, test case priorites, acceptance tests, compliance tests, compatibility tests and hopefully some decent security edge cases.)

I will only use open source software and I will hire a few vps' to host it all.

Is it worth my time? Does anyone want to use bettermeans?  I really feel we can get more project traction with anything other than bettermeans.

- as a side note, bettermeans is now open source so if someone wants to fix that up instead... that would be amazing.

Cheers,

steve

Is this project still alive?

I resurrected this post because I recently saw a discussion about bounty donations for development in reddit and some people wanted to contribute to bounties for testing. Original: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/213o03/contribute_to_the_bitcoin_core_development_each/cg9k7al


I know from experience that testing is a fundamental part of software development, so I hope this project is still alive and moved to another thread/forum/place but if you know this project is completely dead and testing is dying in Bitcoin we must resurrect it.

Testing is usually the biggest bottleneck to fix and improve a released software.


I saw these testing templates in github, are they actually being used?
https://github.com/bitcoin/QA/blob/master/TestPlanCreation.md
https://github.com/bitcoin/QA/blob/master/TestPlanExecution.md
https://github.com/bitcoin/QA/blob/master/TestPlanSkeleton.md

I don't think it is.

I'm waiting to see Hearn's assurance contract platform, Lighthouse: http://blog.vinumeris.com/2014/05/17/lighthouse/

I think it might be a rock solid solution to the core dev funding problem. In my opinion it's a user experience issue. If people were presented with an easy cost->deliverable decision - a lot of people would buy in.

For example, cost for user-defined unit notation in QT (BTC, Bits, satoshis, etc.) in the front-end -> .0001btc per user. I would absolutely donate.

I'm not convinced the whole voting for features with coin thing is the way to go. A better system in my opinion would be https://github.com/alexwaters/bitcointesting.org where users could select from a toggle list the features appealing to them, and drop the ones that weren't.

Just my 2bits