Want to help improving the Debian GNOME packages? Here's how!
Bug reports
Most of the Quality Assurance work on the GNOME packages happens via Debian or upstream bug reports.
Filing good bug reports
Report GNOME bugs as you discover them, either directly upstream or in the Debian BTS, but make sure you follow these simple rules:
duplicates: check whether the bug was already reported before you file a new one
upstream or not: if you are confident the bug is an upstream bug, file it directly at the upstream GNOME Bugzilla, but make sure you search for similar bug reports -- perhaps already closed; when in doubt, file the bug in Debian
how to reproduce: double check you can reproduce the bug and someone else has enough information to reproduce the bug
local hacks: make sure the bug is not caused by a local hack or old libraries
reportbug: use the reportbug tool, it will automatically include information on your architecture, and the versions of the relevant packages
Triaging Debian bugs
forward bug reports upstream: bugs reported in the Debian BTS are often already known -- or even fixed -- upstream; look at Debian bugs, search for corresponding upstream bugs, and connect the bugs with the forwarded command of the control bot perhaps filing a new upstream bug in the process; you may also tag the bugs upstream and even fixed-upstream; if a particular version of the software fixes the bug and it is available in Debian, close the Debian bug report with the first Debian version having with the fix
reproduce and confirm bugs: try reproducing bug reports which did not see activity for a while to see whether these still apply to the current version; request more information or and tag them either unreproducibleor confirmed; make sure you Cc: the bug and the submitter, either directly or via bugid-submitter@bugs.debian.org
searching and testing patches: if you happen to find a patch either in a Debian or in an upstream bug report, you're welcome to test it and confirm it applies and fixes the problem
Some of this is expanded at BugTriage
Systematic bug triaging
If you triage all bug reports in a particular source packages, note down the package and the current date in a Wiki page.
Miscellaneous other tasks
Here are some random tasks that should be accessible to anybody.
Computing dependencies from upstream series
We need a tool to generate the dependencies of binary packages in the meta-gnome2 source package; for example if the latest version of gedit in the 2.x series is 2.x.y, meta-gnome2 2.x.y.* should depend on gedit >= 2.x.y. This might need some checks with the Debian archives, epochs, and various hacks to match modules and module versions upstream. Frederic Peters wrote similar functionality for his GNOME 2.16 status page.
That script is available here: http://master.debian.org/~fpeters/dgs.py