#1 - May 4, 2012, 10:39 p.m.
Without knowing what the design intention is, it is nearly impossible to effective test any specific feature. And since every programming team I've been involved keeps build notes on an on-going basis, I find Blizz's reluctance to publish those somewhat surprising. And I'm not talking about 'in the weeds' type changes (ie, we're changing the order this function is expecting to receive its arguments) , I am referring to the top level changes (ie, the Pet Journal should be fully (or partially) functional).
The sticky in this forum is helpful, as is all the data-mining done by the various sites, but I don't think they are sufficient. And my primary concern is with the lack of design intentions. The basic goal when testing is to answer the question "Is this doing what it is intended to do"? That question cannot be answered if the design's intentions are not specified.
For example, a couple of questions concerning mount sharing:
1) Are the city mounts shared across faction? (Apparently not, based on statements made months ago outside the beta forums. So, my alliance Panderan's ability to ride around on a goblin trike gets reported as a bug, but my NE's inability to ride a goblin trike is a feature)
2) Are mounts that currently require a specific profession to use shared amongst all your characters or not? (Which is the bug: the fact that my non-tailors are unable to use the various flying carpets or the fact that the flying carpets are being shown in my non-tailors' pet journals in the first place?)
3) What about class specific mounts? Should all your characters have access to the warlock or paladin specific mounts?
Blizzard may have outlined their design goals for MOP since its announcement, but I don't think we should have to search thru months of statements or articles to find that information during the beta test. Especially since there is a good possibility that there have been uncommunicated changes to the intentions over that same period.