Wouldnt it be better if Bitcointalk provided a common test environment that was open for anybody to use, without people having to download the software and setting up their own environments? Depending on how the software has been developed, it could be on "debug mode" and trap software errors into a log in its own. Functional errors would logically need to be reported by the people who test the software.
Testing the software has multiple perspectives (installation, functional usage under different profiles such as admin, mod, regular user, db admin, etc.). Surely here the main target would be that of regular users (functionality and stress tests), being the other profiles more delicate and subject to perhaps a delimited cherry-picked set of volunteers. But a common forum created test platform would seem the way to go.