[Events] Test-It event next week?

[Sumana Harihareswara]

On 09/27/2011 07:02 AM, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Sep 2011, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
> 
>> Dear OpenHatch,
>>
>> I'd love to run a "test-it" event for the MediaWiki open source
>> project in coordination with you next week, to test a new version of
>> MediaWiki with people who want to get started as testers.  I'm friends
>> with Asheesh so that's how I heard about the Build-It events, and I
>> figure this kind of structure would be a lovely way to get new people
>> introduced to testing MediaWiki.
>>
>> They won't have to install anything special on their computers, just
>> get their web browsers pointed at one of our test wikis, such as
>> English Wikiquote.
>> <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/16/mediawiki118iscomin/> has more
>> about our deployment to test wikis this week and next.
>>
>> Is that something interesting to you?
> 
> Hi Sumana!
> 
> Sorry it took me a full week to reply. That is too long.

And I hereby make you feel better by being even more belated in my
reply!  My regrets.

> I really want the OpenHatch events to teach people skills that they can
> use by themselves, in the future, to contribute to projects. So, just
> clicking around a web UI isn't something that's appealing to me as an
> OpenHatch event -- what you're suggesting, if I understand it properly,
> doesn't really connect them to a community. It just uses people as labor.
> 
> But I might be mistaken about that. If there's a community part of this,
> like having attendees join an IRC channel that they can stay on after
> the event, or a group on Wikipedia, then that could be interesting.
> 
> Let me know, then, about the community tie-in, or the skills that people
> would gain -- for me, that's what makes events OpenHatchy.
> 
> Also -- I encourage you to join the "Events" mailing list, and let's
> have the rest of the conversation there. That's where other people with
> an interest in outreach events hang out:
> http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/events
> 
> Talk to you soon, and again, sorry about the epic delay. I'll be faster
> in the future!
> 
> -- Asheesh.

I'm on the Events mailing list, and have found it edifying; thank you
for your consistently thorough and thought-provoking writeups.  I'm
cc'ing events at lists.openhatch.org on my reply per your request.

I believe that teaching people to test does provide them with value.
Coaching people in QA would teach them to write and follow test cases,
to use Bugzilla, to think about what it means to write bug reports that
contain proper steps to reproducibility, to gain intuitions about what
kinds of edge cases often help reveal bugs.  I believe Janet at
Participatory Culture Foundation has mentored QA interns whom she taught
these things.

We do not currently have a formal QA community within the MediaWiki
development community, but we do have people participating in manual and
automated testing, defect management, writing test cases, and so on.  I
encourage these people to write on the developers' mailing list, and to
hang out in the developers' IRC channel (#mediawiki).

I'm currently aiding some folks in learning testing skills, and I like
to have them click around the test wiki as a bitesized task BEFORE I
have them install MediaWiki on their own computer, because it's far
easier (it takes a LOT of patience to set up a server, and then PHP, and
then a database, even if the final installation of MediaWiki itself is
fairly easy), and because that way they can see what it will look like
when it works.  So a test-it event could be the prequel to a build-it event.

Sometime this fall, we will unveil Wikimedia Labs -- perhaps
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Wikimedia_Labs is a useful
overview? -- which will give anyone a hosted virtualized turnkey
environment to play with administering, testing, or developing
MediaWiki.  At that point I bet we'll be able to rock some awesome
administration- or dev-centered events with OpenHatch.  Until then, I
think testing events would be worthwhile for you and for us.

best,
Sumana
-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation