Open Source: Is Testing/Bug Reporting A Major Contribution?

Posted by dsimcha on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by dsimcha
Published on 2011-03-17T02:52:07Z Indexed on 2011/03/17 8:17 UTC
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When evaluating contributions to open source projects, does testing the code on various real-world inputs, reducing a large number of complicated bugs to small test cases and filing good bug reports count as a significant contribution? I've done this for several open-source projects (specifically D compilers) where I wanted to help out but the codebase was too complicated to learn my way around in the amount of spare time I have. I'm interested in both the perspective of the main developers (those that write the code and fix the bugs) and from the perspective of employers (in case I want to put it on my resume at some point).

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