As part of our efforts to continuously improve Mudlet and grow the text gaming genre we have also been working on our processes. Establishing a code freeze two weeks prior to release to give more time to catch issues, setting up automated and categorized changelogs and creating the automated checks around our pull requests on GitHub to keep them consistent are just some of the steps we have taken in the last several months to improve the experience of people both using and contributing to Mudlet.
Today I get the pleasure of announcing we have expanded the Mudlet team to include a group of official testers to help us with testing and managing pull requests and issues. This way when a Mudlet core developer sees that a PR has been approved by a member of our testing group we can be confident the functionality itself has been tested, and we can focus our efforts on making sure the code in the change is as safe and effective as possible.
We’ve had a ‘Testers’ group in the Mudlet discord for a while, and some of you may be wondering why this is needed given that role exists and has several people in it already. The short answer is because it’s a self-assigned role via a reaction on a bot post, it tends to be fairly inactive and we have people signing up for it, then never saying a word. They also could not really help with as much as it was not a part of the organization on GitHub. It’s my sincere hope that by creating a smaller group and empowering them to actually take part in the pull request process we’ll be able to get a bit more active testing around the changes being introduced to Mudlet rather than a group of sidelined observers we just ask to try potentially broken versions of Mudlet from time to time.
The Mudlet community has always been one of its biggest assets in my opinion, and so when I started setting this up I knew I wanted to draw from that community. We have many very helpful Discord members who have been with us for a while which meant the hardest part was paring the list down. And as always you don’t need to be in any ‘official’ groups to help us test and improve Mudlet. With all that being said, please join me in welcoming our newest members of the team (in no particular order, by Discord handle):
- Delra/Crochety Coder
- Tamarindo
- Edru
- Eraene
- atari2600tim
I’m excited to have them join us, and look forward to working more closely with them in the future. If you find you’re motivated to do Mudlet testing and want to join them, you should DM me @demonnic on our Discord and we’ll have a chat and see if it’s a good fit. The team is not even a week old yet, and so we haven’t really established any formal processes around joining or participating in it yet.
Happy MU*ing,
Damian
