KDE Quality Team
KDE Quality Team
The KDE Quality Team is an opportunity to learn and to contribute to the KDE project. It is a great start for developers and non-developers, but non-developers will find it especially appealing, because no programming skills are required to be part of the team and highly productive.
If you always asked yourself "What can I do to help back the community?", this is your opportunity! And part of the job of the team member is to assist newcomers, so the team will help you as you go.
What Are The KDE Quality Team Member Tasks?
While the work of programmers is a necessary condition to build a desktop environment, there are many other important tasks in a project of this magnitude that can be performed by contributors who know little about programming.
A team member should choose one application to take care of, and act to ensure the quality of application. Preferentially, choose one application you are already familiar with, because this way the time to start contributing to the project can be greatly reduced. Creating and maintaining a KDE application involves communication and promotion, documentation, user interface and testing.
If you are a programmer, or want to become one, please check the Hacking HOWTO, and do not hesitate to development ask questions in the mailing list.
The quality of an application depends on all the areas above. It is very uncommon to be excellent in all areas. For instance, an application may deliver excellent functionality, but lack good documentation. It is our task to improve the general level of quality. Just by taking the time to report bugs or writing an article about the application or answering questions in the user lists already makes you part of the community. But if you are willing to take a little bit of time to learn the basics of contributing to the KDE project, be certain that your help will be invaluable. There is a wide range of tasks to fit many different contributor profiles!
Ok, I Am In! So What Should I Do?
Start subscribing to the KDE Quality Team Mailing List and announce yourself. The KDE quality team's mailing list is a great place to know about applications that need help, news of general interest for members and a place you are welcome to ask (or answer) technical questions.
If you know what application you want to work with, and what you want to do, check the KDE Quality Team HOWTO for tips and information about the task you want to perform. If you don't know yet, you may ask the list for guidance, and read the Quality Team Tasks Page to find out what kind of activity you like best and the requirements to perform this task. Each activity has a different set of requirements. For instance, to be a KDE unstable tester, it is necessary to know how to compile KDE unstable.
If you do know what application you would like to work with, check the applications module page for general instructions. Modules are groups of related applications. From there, access the applications Quality Team page. This page should list current team members, the status of the different areas of the application and tasks, coordinating the efforts to make your application rock! If your application or module does not have a page yet, you are welcome to create one. Identifying the lacking areas in an organized manner is already a great step.
KDE Quality Team Modules and Applications Pages
Before looking for applications specific tasks, it is a good idea to read the KDE Quality Teams Tasks Page. It provides interesting activity ideas for contributors, notifies of the requirements for performing these activities and informs on how to fullfill these requirements.
Part of the effort of the Quality Team is to make it easy to visualize where you can fit, and to organize the work in a decentralized manner. For some groups of similar applications (called "modules") there are already wiki pages where you can see the status for the tasks (for instance, if a document is up to date or not, if someone is working on it, etc...). Below you can find a list of the currently available module wiki pages. You are welcome to visit, include your name, modify and improve them.
- KDE PIM Open Tasks and Status Homepage: The kdepim module is the home of Kontact, KMail, KOrganizer, KPilot, KAlarm, KNode, KNotes and other P.I.M. applications, and it is very actively developed. The lists of tasks of this module is updated for the current KDE release cycle.
- KOffice Open Tasks and Status Homepage: KOffice is a very ambitious suite of applications and offers amazing functionality, but suffers from lack of man power. The applications include KWord, KSpread, KPresenter, Krita, Kexi, Kivio, Karbon 14, KFormula, KChart and Kougar.
- KDE Edutainment Tasks Page: with the noble goal of developing high quality educational software, the KDE Edutainment Project currently features language, mathematics, science and teaching tools software. In addition to the wiki page, there is also a Open Tasks Page for tasks that need to be done before the next KDE release.
- KDE Multimedia Software Tasks Page: If you use and like multimedia software, contributing to KDE Multimedia or one of the applications: amaroK, Brahms (Sequencer/Notation Editor), Juk (Music Jukebox), K3b (CD/DVD-Burning), Kaboodle (Media Player), Kaffeine (Media Player), KAudioCreator (CD Ripper), KMid (Midi/Karaoke Player), KMix, KMPlayer, KPlayer, KRec, KSCD (CD Player), Noatun (Media Player), NoteEdit (Notation Editor) and Rosegarden (Sequencer/Notation Editor)
- KDE Artists Website: If you have talent drawing raster or vector graphics, composing web pages, creating sounds and effects, the KDE Artists project is for you. KDE Artists work on the artwork of KDE, including icons, Qt styles, KWin window decoration styles, colour schemes, wallpapers, sound themes and more.
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