The Goal

BugSquad is a volunteer team, whose main goal is to improve the quality and usability of Liferay project releases before they are generally available. Team members provide valuable feedback from their day-to-day usage of Liferay, incorporating the way they use Liferay directly into the resulting product. In addition, team members gain valuable experience in using the Liferay platform, both in existing features and functionality, and upcoming new features.

Some Stats

Check out the JIRA Dashboard for the BugSquad team's activities.  The various graphs show details such as number of issues filed, number of issues resolved, and a heatmap of which components within Liferay are receiving the most attention from BugSquad!

The Process

Currently, the BugSquad team is in the first phase of working with the upcoming Liferay 6.2 release.  For this release, BugSquad has been split into two phases.

Phase 1

The first phase of the program involves reviewing the new Liferay Features (such as Recycle Bin, Application Display Templates, and others), with the goal of identifying any usability gaps, or other issues that would be encountered if this were released as-is.  Team members are issued a standard set of learning guides, and a simple procedure to exercise functionality.  With minimal or no documentation, this means that the intuitiveness of the User Interface is well tested.  Members provide feedback in the form of annotated notes, and Liferay Engineers work directly with the team members to resolve misunderstandings, file bugs or improvements, and generally seek to understand the comments provided, and hopefully coming to a shared understanding of how best to improve the product.

Phase 2

The second phase of the program involves downloading and trying an upcoming Release Candidate build for Liferay, and finding (but not necessarily fixing) bugs. If issues are known and identified before the final release, they have a good chance of getting fixed!  A win-win situation all around, and the team gets some hands-on Liferay experience, and valuable networking with other community members and Liferay staff.  If you're interested in participating, contact community@liferay.com.

Moving Forward

For current and future releases of Liferay, the plan is to engage a new BugSquad team within 2-3 months before a final release.  Of course, the Liferay Community participates year-round in the development of the Liferay project, so efforts such as those of BugSquad are welcome at any time!  However, closer to a release, it becomes more important (and more feasible) to identify issues in usability and functionality, to ensure that the final, generally-available release satisfies as many community members as possible.

As this is an entirely volunteer-driven effort, team membership will vary with time, and it is understood that not everyone will be able to participate as fully as they may have in the past.  Any amount of effort is certainly appreciated and recognized!