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Test Day February 20, 2009

Test days are done to stress test specific features in a development version of Thunderbird, to identify its strengths and weaknesses. This test day we stress test new features prior to freezing the code which will later ship as Thunderbird 3 beta 2 (3.0b2).

We encourage you to participate, however be advised that we are testing with nightly builds. These have not yet gone through quality (QA) testing. Use at your own risk and protect your mail, data and profile with appropriate backups. On the positive side, several relatively stable version 3 early releases have been issued, and many people successfully use nightly builds on a daily basis without major problems or dataloss.

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Prepare

Protect your data and consider using a test profile to avoid potential dataloss.

Focus and Testing

Activity manager - which gives valuable feedback on what Thunderbird is actually doing in the background.

Using Build1, test as follows and report all issues you find:

• Activity Manager bug 257942 + Thunderbird:Activity_Manager
  1. Open the activity manager in Tools->Activity manager
  2. Use Thunderbird as you normally would and keep an eye on the activity manager window. Look for problems in the manager.
  3. Try many concurrent activities - for example reading a new newsgroup and getting it's header while you are updating RSS feeds, checking for new emails, subscribing newsgroups, move and search messages, etc
  4. Long usage of the manager - keep the manager visible for many hours and see that it still works, if performance is degraded, if other areas of the UI or background activity are affected.
  5. Check for errors - From time to time check the error console (Tools>Error Console) to see if anything went wrong. Try to reproduce if you can and file a bug.

• Archive (bug 451995) + Thunderbird:Message_Archive
  1. Archive a few emails using Archive button and Message > Archive
  2. Make sure archived messages are still searchable
  3. Play with the date and time of your computer and see what happens (Nice dates to test with are <1970 and >2035 )
  4. See the effect of filters when you have archived a few emails, especially what happens when a filter targets a archive folder.

• about:rights bug 463367
  1. Make sure that at install time you are not presented with a EULA - but with a grey notification bar on the bottom of the main window
  2. Make sure that after a restart it still is visible
  3. Resize your window when the bar is visible and see what happens

• Memory Allocator bug 427627 + explaination by Standard8
  1. We've switched the memory allocator on windows and Linux
  2. Open plenty of windows
  3. Don't serialize your activity - do many things at once, like reply to few emails, leave the reply windows open and click the send button closing the windows at the same time

If you want to spend more time Participate in the Litmus test run

How to provide feedback

Both negative and positive feedback will be helpful. Please be clear, complete and specific in your descriptions. Choices:

• File a new bug
• #thunderbird channel on mozilla irc
• Hendrix feedback web form (no account needed)

Help and Tips

Ask for help on IRC in #thunderbird if you need assistance. See the Testdays page for information about IRC and other test day information.

Other ways you can help

See Getting Involved and Thunderbird:Testing for other ways you can help with Thunderbird. See Thunderbird:Home for information about the future of Thunderbird.

Thanks

Thank you helping today. We appreciate you taking the time to participate in the open source development process, and for helping to improve Thunderbird