Comments on Mathias blog post about contributing

Hi Mathias, all,

I'm following your blog post on Gullfoss here. Thanks for this post. 
Some feedback from my point of view, dealing with localization and a 
very little experience as CWS QA Rep.

Concerning the last, I've already reported the difficulty to get the 
builds when so many are enqueued on Termite.
What a community member like me has the most to fight with when doing QA 
is time. It's not very hard to check for issues, to run VCLTestTools or 
write TCS, but it takes a lot of time for each (and also a lot of time 
to learn to do every thing the right way, but it's really a very good 
experience thanks to the e-team I've worked with :).

Tools are not so difficult (for a non technical person like me) and I 
found that dealing with EIS (the QA part) is really helpful.
The good points :
- Termite to build install sets
- Ability to run the Automation CAT0 on Sun servers
- Direct upload of the tests results on QUASTe
- Comparison with MWS, you just have to run again the fails locally.
- EIS allow a very good coordination between all of us.
All this chain is really time saving (your own machines can rest ;)

The difficulties :
- Not enough bots or optimized builds bots to have more capacity for 
building install sets.
- Install sets by the bots are different from Sun builds that make some 
automated tests failing (why the quickstarter is available on linux 
builds? it took me some time to understand that I have to disable it first)
- No documentation on the interaction between EIS and QUASTe (or I 
didn't find it and yes I can write it by myself ;). There is still one 
button that I don't understand in QUASTe that sound to have an impact on 
EIS. Also I'm not sure that what you (Sun) see is what I (community) 
see, we do not have access to the same interfaces.
- No access to TCS repository (that mean that being a community member, 
you don't access all the tools involved in the process).
All in all, as a community member, you just have the feeling that it's 
very very difficult to contribute to CWS QA, when for some CWS of 
course, it may not be more complicated than following the localization 
process for example.

Concerning the localization process. Well, we still have a lot of things 
to improve from my point of view. A better communication and 
coordination with developers may have its place here more than our usual 
complains against Pootle. So yes,
- helpcontent should be part of the concerned CWS, if it is mark that 
the help is concerned, then the corresponding task should part of the 
CWS issue list
- there should not be a new CWS added to SVN with no spec or a detailed 
issue
- I support your idea of working with SCM, if well documented I'm sure 
we will be able to get the support of other l10n teams to work on CWS 
and mercurial, and more if that avoid us all this mess up in the last 
snapshots.

Kind regards
Sophie