Hello fellow Tester,
this page explains your duties and abilities in detail.
== Introduction
You found this page either by accident in the wiki, or were pointed to it by various reasons.
This could be:
* Application as Tester
* Personal interest in the things going on in development
* Bookmarked this page to quickly access the Filters on the top of it
It is no problem to become a tester and be part of this team.
Some things seem to be focused to be only done by very few people.
Yes, this is true.
But not a thing the few people really like.
We would really like to have 10-15 people helping reliable with that.
So everyone could work through 1 bug per day or less, and play the rest of the day.
Most of the testers didn't even play a single hour the last months,
without intention to trigger a bug to destroy the work invested.
Why?
It seems to turn out,
that most people run away when the 'talking about doing something' gets to the part of 'actually doing something'.
And this is the part where you come on the plan.
Want to know the most basic parts about being a tester?
Here is the right place to begin with.
== General
We are the 'firewall' between the public and the developers,
as getting reports about a broken feature may not always be correct at all.
They may be caused by malfunctions, viruses or improperly setup user systems.
In this case fixing it from our side is not possible
and will most likely damage the function for all (or at least the majority of others).
So our main task is to reproduce it under 'controled' environment,
to ensure there is no time wasted by the rather few developers in the specific function.
== Areas of Operation
You may not have expected,
but we evaluate not only the game itself.
We are also responsible for trying out new features on the site,
and track/confirm anything that may go wrong in the existing public available areas.
Therefore, please do not browse into the projects itself to look for work/tasks to do.
Use the filters and charts linked in the quick reference, or always go via:
"Projects" -> "View all issues"
to access all globally meant filters.
== Tiers
We have only few requirements to take the trial, and learn to help with development.
There different tiers of testers. (From low to high)
==== Trial Tester
You most likely start here, trial tester are sort of apprentice and cannot view private issues
and have mostly strict settings on status transitions to enforce the learning of them.
They also cannot process outgoing quality checks. (Step 4)
You stay in this group until you are promoted to become a 'Tester' or get removed from this group for inactivity.
There is no fixed timespan to end this phase.
Its main purpose is to allow to process issues in the tracker, and become used to the flows the issues are going.
You should also try and join the Tester-chat, to get in contact with the others.
==== Tester
Those are testers that regularly help, and got past the trial phase.
Benefits of this group:
- slightly lowered rules on transitions between statuses
- outgoing quality checks permitted
This is the group most will be in.
Here are all from freelancers (infrequent presence) to helpers that have a large amount of time to spare for the tracking.
We do not have a minimum activity,
but you should be reachable easily in case you are needed to put feedback into an Issue you are working with.
==== Established Tester
This is a special status for long term, highly active and trusted testers.
Benefits of this group:
- can process private issues
- nearly no rules or enforced transitions
Here are those, that somehow earned the trust to process security relevant things.