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From Community contributions for those who don’t feel rockstarry enough yet.

I agree. You don’t have to be a rockstar to contribute to open source, there are many other ways besides programming. One of them is bug triaging.

Triaging bugs is an important part of any development process, and it’s simple (but somewhat tedious). A nice start point may be browsing the bugtracking system, and looking for bug reports with missing information (and asking for it), verifying that the correct component has been chosen, and identifying duplicates.

When I was quality assurance technician two years ago (uh, seems ages now), about 10% of my time everyday was kind of bug triaging. A messy bugtracking system isn’t useful, so it’s a needed task.

Once you decided to put love in a bug report, try to to be polite. I remember the fights between QA and I+D departments, and half of the disputes can be avoided easily just being considerate when updating a bug report.