Does anyone know of any smaller but well maintained open source project that need some moderately professional testing done? For example, basic functional testing, compatibility testing or even writing test cases?

I work for a small software and hardware testing firm and we use a lot of open source applications and we'd like to give back to the community by helping in some open source projects. Please, feel free to let me know if you, friends or colleagues are interested. We'd love to help.

You don't need the permission of the developers to do what you want. For example, I once decided that gFTP was a good program but that the user documentation was skimpy. I went through gFTP and tried every possible function and wrote user documentation about how it worked. Along the way I found several minor bugs in gFTP. I reported the bugs to Brian Masney and he fixed them.

I suggest that you pick some open source applications that you use heavily and run your various tests on those applications. Any developer would welcome a knowledgeable user running rigorous tests against their software and reporting back the results.

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Steve Stites