We Need You! (to try and break stuff)

Guys, this one is coming from the heart.

We keep talking about how Mageia is this and Mageia needs that and Mageia did this totally awesome thing. But you know what? That’s a little bit misleading. See, Mageia isn’t some huge corporation, or even a small business. Mageia is an organization of people. People like you. And right now, we need people like you.

Anybody who has ever tried to get a job in the high tech industry knows that the vast majority of starter positions is in QA (that’s Quality Assurance, something we ALL need). That’s because that area needs the largest workforce. After all, it takes just a few brilliant minds to come up with excellent algorithms, a few more people to actually write the code, and vast legions of people who need to try every possible way to make it not work the way it is supposed to. Because somewhere, someone will find that one weird thing you can do that will crash the whole thing. And before we ship anything, be it a new operating system or just the smallest security update, we need assurances that it stands up to our high demand for quality.

And that’s where you come in.

Today, our QA team is very small. How small is it? It’s so small that right now there really is only one hardened QA expert. To begin with there were two, but one has been forced to cut back a lot of the work due to health issues. We hope that he gets well soon. Now most of the work falls on our only other QA expert. She’s doing her best to give the quality assurances we need while trying to train the small handful of volunteers. Don’t make any mistake, those “untrained professionals” are doing great work as well. In fact, they do an incredible amount of work of really top notch quality despite being rather new to QA, and they’re swamped too. We need more people like them.

Every time a new update comes out it needs to be tested on both supported releases (currently Mageia 3 and Mageia 4) for both architectures (32 and 64 bit). That means that every little security update or new feature needs to be tested 4 times before we can ship it to you, and most of that work is being done by just one person.

We need more people and you can help.
It’s really easy. With a little bit of training and some hands on experience you too can become a great QA tester.

Just head over to the QA portal and find out how you can help.

Mageia is people, and right now we need some help.