The discussion started with some slides based on ideas from AnnCopestake.

The following people agreed to be the offical testers for their grammars. They are responsible for checking that the grammar performs as expected with the various software components that it uses, such as the LKB, the lexical DB, PET and [incr tsdb()]. The testers should join the developers mailing list and will be asked from time to time to check a new release against a standard release, using whatever test set is appropriate for their grammar.

The advantage to each group of having a designated tester is that it will be much easier to make sure that their grammar is compatible with current releases of the software. Testers will also gain a deeper understanding of the formalism and implementation, which in turn should help grammar development.

Eventually, it would be very useful if one of the testers would take responsibility for organisation, including ranking bugs by seriousness, ensuring that a serious bug is being checked and helping to develop test sets that allow developers to check particular aspects of the software quickly.