Wednesday 11 April 2012

OpenSource or community projects for testing ?

It is good to join any open source projects. Once you know basics there are hundreds of projects there, find one or two and join them. It helps in many ways:

1)You know how others are testing their standards, their way of testing , new tools.

2) Its improve your communication skills, when you interact with others , you learn " to listen others", " what you say and think may not be always correct", " what you write and you meant can be given entirely different meaning by different people"

3) It improves your self confidence.

For development side or coding side there are number of projects but for manual testing, I think there is limited scope but still if you are willing to, you can find one and join one and more importantly contribute in them.

Some of good online testing platform which will help you are :

1) utest:  They have a large community of testers and one can join them depending on their skill set. As there are many people in there looking for projects , i think for newcomers it is difficult to get first project.You need to be over enthusiastic with proper skill set and you may get started on this. Try your luck.

To be true i joined them 3 months back but never got projects, may be my skill set not matching with requirements or may be i m not following them very keenly :-)

http://www.utest.com/

2) Bugpub: For this you should have linked in profile through which you can request to join them. Also you should report at-least one public app or website bug.

http://bugpub.com/

In above two you get paid if you execute projects.

Others open source projects:

1) Mozilla Firefox : They have testing session on each Friday, you can join them and participate in their beta releases. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/

2) Ubuntu:  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing

3) MeGo : http://wiki.meego.com/Contributing_to_MeeGo

4) Fusesource:  http://fusesource.com/community/why/

6) Testlink: http://www.teamst.org/index.php/howto-contribute

the best way to get linked is , participate in that which you use on daily basis in home or office. If you use Mozilla on daily basis first try to know more and more about it by joining its community and participating in forum. Once you are comfortable in using it ask for contribution in any form in which you are comfortable.

It is always about having patience because millions of people are out there and the person who has started it will be apprehensive first , but if you are serious and it shows in your communication in forum or community they will accept it sooner or later.

So keep trying and keep learning.