As you may know, we recently set up a Quality and Testing team within KDE. We prepared some wiki pages (http://community.kde.org/Getinvolved/Testing/Beta) and now that the Beta 1 is out, several people already joined this Testing phase.

How can you get involved?
Install the Beta 1 from your distribution, most known distributions provide packages for it.
After that, you can choose two ways of testing:
– either use the release as you would normally and look for regressions, bugs, crashes,… Please report them to bugs.kde.org (try to search if the bug was already reported, for a quicker result you can ask on IRC, freenode, in #kde-bugs), do not forget to set up the version in your bug report as well as the precise stps to reproduce the bug. If it is a regression, explain how it was before.
– or choose a specific component to test in a more thorough way. We focus in priority on new additions to this release, on changed components and on new features. You can therefore test applets (http://community.kde.org/Getinvolved/Testing/Beta/Plasma) or test full programs (http://community.kde.org/Getinvolved/Testing/Beta/4.9Applications) or new features (http://community.kde.org/index.php?title=Getinvolved/Testing/Beta/AreasToTest). Copy the proposed tests in a text file and add a note like “works” or “OK” after testing each proposed feature. Then send your text to the Quality Team (kde-testing@kde.org) with your name or nickname. You can also extend those tests if you find other things to test, that will be useful in the future and also when we will move to more automated tests. I believe testing an applet does not require much time while testing a full application is more time demanding.
There is something to work on for everyone!
Testing does not require any specific knowledge: install the Beta and have a bugzilla account are the only requirements.
Please do not hesitate to join this effort and raise the quality of this release. Developers will then get batches of bugs to fix, priority will be given to regression and blockers. Several bugs already have been fixed!

IRC channels on freenode are #kde-quality and #kde-bugs
Mailing list is https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-testing …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE