Application maintainers are the cornerstone of the Application Database. Here is a description of the tasks they must perform for their applications.
This is not the most important task but it's still good to describe what the application does. This description should be short and ideally you would accompany it with screenshots of the application running in Wine (assuming it does run in Wine).
The application may not work or even install the first time you try it. Don't give up just yet. Try the tricks described in the Wine Help section. The goal here is to get the application working as best as possible by tweaking the Wine environment.
Once you have found some settings that seem to work, wipe out your .wine directory and start over. This is so you can verify that the result you obtained is reproducible and that you did not forget some steps or configuration tweaks.
Also, this time try to only use application-specific settings for dll overrides and such. This is important to minimize the conflicts between applications.
Hopefully you kept notes while working on the previous task because now you will have to describe what you have done.
Configuring Wine so an application runs well is hard, there are a lot of options and combinations to try and most Wine users won't have the time or patience to go through it all. This is why this task is probably the most important: it lets the other Wine users benefit from your hard earned experience in running this application as best as possible.
So describe carefully the Wine configuration options to use. Don't hesitate to include the relevant configuration file snippets, especially those application specific sections which users can just drop in at the end of their configuration file. Also, don't forget to mention any pre-requisites to installing the application such as installing Internet Explorer or other software the application depends upon.
Finally you may want to provide the command line to use to start the application as this is not always obvious, especially if the application needs a specific working directory.
Potential users of this application will want to know which features are usable and which are not. It is only armed with this information that they will be able to determine whether the application is usable for them or not.
Of course if the application does not work this will be simple. If the application does work, then try to exercise its various modules like: opening and saving files, importing and exporting files, printing, the print preview mode, etc.
If there is an area that you were not able to test (e.g. printing because you have no printer), mention it too.
Also mention any stability problem (application crash of freeze) which you cannot track to any specific feature.
Rate the application as described Maintainers Ratings System Guidelines. The work you did in the above step will come in handy to determine the appropriate rating.
If in the above steps you have identified reproducible issues, report them in WineHQ's Bugzilla, following the guidelines given in the Wine User's Guide.
Ideally you would test it once a week so that you can quickly notify the Wine developers of any regression. The earlier a Wine regression is noticed, the easier it will be to locate the change that causing it and the more likely it is to be fixed.
At the very least you should test the application with each Wine release. If you detect a regression at that point you should do some regression testing to identify the patch causing the problem.
People will want to follow in your footsteps but some may stumble along the way. Try to work out with them why stuff that works for you does not work for them. Maybe they changed a global Wine setting that interfers with your application. Maybe that global Wine setting is needed to run another application. Try to see if there's a way to get both applications working.
This includes monitoring the application forum to make sure it remains on topic and to remove obsolete information.
Hopefully these steps form a reasonably logical progression. Despite this, it is likely you will have to iterate a bit, especially between the application testing and configuration tweaking steps.