I think Nostr would be probably 200% better if we had someone to test apps reliably.
Iām not talking about a āQA engineerā whatever, just someone that isnāt a programmer but can install things, click buttons and report bugs.
I have the impression that this is a role that died in the industry of software development, but it is much needed now, and much more in the age of AI code.
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Who knows, maybe those users were not that great. Probably many of them were just requesting their preferred feature or insisting on one specific bug that bothered themselves particularly. This is all good too, but not exactly the most perfect environment for development.
But assuming they were great selfless testers, they were doing it for free, and it is a tiresome thing to do. Because they were doing it for free they had the right to expect more from the developers, which means they would be more frustrated by the attention they got.
A āprofessionalā wouldnāt be frustrated.
I agree that someone that knows what Nostr is and uses it in some form is a better tester than a random guy. And I agree that having this service available would be nice and valuable. I just think that it will me more valuable if developers started actively requesting it, and then committed to following up on the reports.
As you can read in other replies, many users that tried to help are now quite discouraged.
Zap!
Who will developers ask? There must be someone they will ask. Also I donāt think the majority of developers are careless. Some are, for sure, but I believe most developers want to make a good product and may just not know exactly what next steps to take (this is most true when they donāt even know if and who or why anyone is using their stuff). They also may never ask, but would welcome good bug reports anyway. Having someone dedicated to doing this would be good regardless. The dedicated guy could just stop testing an app if the developer didnāt care about the initial bug reports.
Currently all we have are users, with mixed abilities, interests, personalities and time available for this type of work, so the anedoctal examples may not provide a complete picture. Having someone dedicated could make a big difference. Maybe not, but itās worth trying.
Crowd testing platforms serve a different purpose, I think. Having someone who knows your product and knows what youāre trying to do point where it is failing is very different than getting a complete stranger to complain about everything it didnāt understand.
These crowd testing platforms that provide videos of someone using the app and commenting are also a massive drain: you have to watch the video, takes time and brain effort, and then how do you know that person represents something real and itās not just an outlier? I guess you have to watch hundreds of videos. This is completely different than what Iām proposing here, but maybe a dedicated tester could also be the one that watched such videos and summarized them, incorporated that feedback into their own feedback, from the perspective of someone who understands the app and the developer better.
This is a good point.
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#ManySuchCases?
eg. https://github.com/jvsena42/mandacaru/issues?q=author%3Athebutterzone
@idsera is pretty good at it too, but he refuses to do it as a job, he only does it for the apps he loves.
I think it makes sense once youāre past a certain number of programmers. A single tester is probably enough for maybe 5 or more programmers, I donāt know.
On Nostr in general we have 20+ apps in need of testing, and we could have someone doing this part time, slowly going through each app, anything would be better than the current situation.
If you can prove youāre good at it you should definitely get an OpenSats grant or something. Have you done any bug reporting lately?
Thatās also what @PABLOF7z told me when I said the thing above to him some months ago.
Now he has (correctly) changed his mind:
Agreed
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