Where SeaMonkey Needs Your Help

As you might know, a community project like SeaMonkey always needs help from everyone who can contribute his or her time - and testing our alpha/beta versions, release candidates, and development (nightly) builds as well as reporting bugs are the first steps to doing that.

As a reader of this blog, the chance is high that you know that already and have read our web page on getting involved already. You might very well have the time and ability to help even more, but the information on developing Mozilla may sound too scary as the next step.

If that's the case, here are a few options where SeaMonkey really can use your help and that might be good entry point to becoming involved somewhat deeper:

• Bug Triage:
  Our project has inherited a large list of bug reports and enhancement requests from the previous Mozilla suite, and we also get new reports from people who only start with getting involved now. You can help sort out which of those reports in Bugzilla are really helpful to developers, so that those can find the things to work on more easily.
  We're basically tracking two list of reports right now and keeping a third one in mind:
• unconfirmed bugs need your help in finding out if they contain useful information at all (set to RESOLVED/INCOMPLETE if not), do actually apply to our product (adjust product/component if they're about other Mozilla products, RESOLVED/INVALID if not), are duplicates of other reports (mark as that if they are) and can be reproduced (RESOLVED/WORKSFORME if nobody can do so). If they actually are useful and valid bugs, their state should be changed from UNCONFIRMED to NEW.
• Bugs in the SeaMonkey::General component should be sorted out into other components or products. That components is a catch-all for people who don't know where to put their reports, ideally it should not hold any bugs any developer is really working on. You can help in finding the right place for those reports to live in.
• A somewhat scary list we're keeping in mind is bugs not changed since the SeaMonkey project started. We inherited that quite large list from the old Mozilla suite any many of those just do not apply any more the SeaMonkey and therefore can be resolved as INVALID or INCOMPLETE. Still, someone needs to do the work of actually looking at them to find out if they still apply and do that cleanup of resolving them.

Help Content and Documentation:
We have a number of help content updates we want to have in SeaMonkey's collection of inline help by the SeaMonkey 2 release, if you can help writing that up, it would benefit a good number of users.
Extending Mozilla Developer Documentation is of course appreciated by all Mozilla-based projects, including SeaMonkey.

Automated Test Cases:
SeaMonkey is using the same automated testing frameworks as Firefox nowadays, but we lack test cases for most of the SeaMonkey-specific code. We are very much in need of developing more tests and doing that is a very good way of learning how our code works. This makes it a win-win situation: You learn how all this works and should work and help the whole project to ensure that it keeps working correctly even as our development moves along.

Good First Bugs:
If you want to dive in even deeper and are looking for real bugs to fix, there is a list of reports with [good first bug] in the status whiteboard which should be things you should be able to pick up easily enough. We'd really appreciate if you can come up with patches for them and we are around in #seamonkey and #maildev to help you figure out how to do that.
Developers, if you come around bugs that should be on that list, please add this marker!

Helpwanted Bugs:
If you're looking for even more bugs that need help, there is a list of bugs with the helpwanted keyword, which is set where module owners or peers would really appreciate someone from outside their group to help. It looks like some of those are old enough though that you might want to see if they are still valid and useful, and triage them accordingly before starting work on them.

I hope there's something for you in those areas, we'd very much appreciate any help we can get in any of them.

You can make a difference and improve the SeaMonkey suite. Yes, you can.