Call for Participation in Openbravo 2.35 Maintenance Pack 1 Acceptance Testing

I do not blog as much as I should but so far it looks like a pattern: once on release naming convention and a few days later on acceptance testing.

Openbravo is just about to launch its first maintenance pack, 2.35 MP1, and we are asking the community to help us validate its quality before release.

If you are willing and able - or if you wanted to participate for 2.35 and couldn't - this opportunity is for you! Notify us of your interest by sending an email to collaborate@openbravo.com.

The process is going to be very similar to what we did for R2.35, but with a few improvements based on the lessons we learned in that exercise. Specifically, here is what we are asking:

1. We will give you early access to the installer through a private FTP server. You will essentially receive the release at the same time as our QA team.
2. We will give you access to our QA portal, where you can see our test cases for the acceptance test. Following the experience with the previous round of acceptance testing, we have significantly improved the quality of test cases.
   
3. We will assign you a set of test cases and we expect that you will install the application on your server, run the test cases and report the outcome in the QA portal
   
4. Contrary to what we did in 2.35, we will not assign you any bug to verify as we will execute that task internally (we think it is more productive this way). Obviously you are free to verify specific bugs that you care about.
5. If you have any questions or doubts during the process, we will be available on the IRC channel to answer.
   

Acceptance testing should start today and ideally should last 4 or 5 days. However, as most countries are in the Holiday Season, we plan to extend acceptance testing till January 4th.

Please remember that this is going to be Acceptance Testing, not a full blown QA cycle. The purpose of Acceptance Testing is to validate that an already QA'ed release is good to go and that the last build didn't introduce any major regression (essentially: test the product as it is going to be shipped before your users do to avoid to be embarrassed later).
Because of that, we will stop the release of the maintenance pack only if one of the test cases fails with a significant bug or one of the critical bugs that we thought had been fixed still reproduces. Nonetheless, we do expect you to log all issues you find, including small bugs, as we will fix those in future releases.

So what is 2.35 MP1? It is a stabilization pack that solves approximately 41 of the most severe issues that have been reported by the community and represents a major milestone in Openbravo's commitment to deliver a stable Community Edition that can be acquired and operated in a truly free manner.

We look forward to your participation in this very important milestone!