[Events] Making a "Test-it" event happen

[Chris McMahon]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 9:17 PM, Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at asheesh.org> wrote:

> I think this would be great. Chris, would you be interested in that?
>

I would!

Asheesh, I agree with your last paragraph about retention and "dedicated
event times".   My ultimate goal for Wikipedia/Mediawiki is to have in
place something like Mozilla's "test days"
https://quality.mozilla.org/category/events/month

But before that happens, I want to create some good publicity, some "buzz"
among both professional software testers and also in FOSS that Wikipedia is
a cool place to contribute public test effort.

As Sumanah mentioned, I have this collaboration planned for May 5 with
Weekend Testing.  However, I am aware of another significant project at WMF
coming up in early June, would you like to explore the possibility of an
OpenHatch/WMF testing collaboration in early June?   I can provide guidance
and focus on what is to be tested, and probably expose some testers to
OpenHatch, if you think OpenHatch contributors would like to help WMF test
a new and important feature.

Let me know what you think...
-Chris


>
>
> Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 04/13/2012 07:14 PM, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
>> > Hi all Event-y people,
>> >
>> > Sumana and I had a conversation a few months ago about organizing a
>> > "Test It" event, where OpenHatch encouraged free software fans to test
>> > (and report) issues in their favorite free software package.
>> >
>> > Sumana, as I recall, you were interested because MediaWiki was having a
>> > major update, and so it was a good time for such an event in October 2011.
>> >
>> > It's way past October 2011, but I definitely think that a
>> > community-centric, retention-oriented software testing event is
>> > something that could be great.
>> >
>> > Right now, I don't have the bandwidth to organize such a thing, but I'll
>> > quickly lay out what I think it would take. Anyone on this list (or
>> > elsewhere in the world) could step up and
>> run it, and if it fits the
>> > following structure (or otherwise is awesome), I'd be quite happy to
>> > hand that person the OpenHatch banner to do it so that it feels like a
>> > cross-community collaboration!
>> >
>> > * Select software projects with some community around testing
>> >
>> > For MediaWiki, it seems that testers hang out in the main #mediawiki IRC
>> > channel and pop in now and then, mentioning issues and being welcomed.
>> > That's a level of community-around-testing that's a baseline for what
>> > I'm after, and so of course that qualifies. Anything stronger also works
>> > -- for example, Mozilla has a big QA operation with a separate IRC
>> > channel and mailing list and active participants.
>> >
>> > * Find "point people" within each project to promise to be available as
>> > mentors on IRC or otherwise in real-time
>> >
>> > * Make sure that the people showing up to be
>> testers have something
>> > specific to test
>> >
>> > * Make sure that there is a specific time for each project (perhaps the
>> > times overlap, or perhaps they don't) so that attendees feel some
>> > urgency (-:
>> >
>> > * Come up with some reasonable follow-up plan to find out what impact
>> > the event had, with particular regard to retention
>> >
>> > * Write a blog post for the OpenHatch blog about how the event went
>> >
>> > * Write a note for this list about how the event went (could be the same
>> > text as above)
>> >
>> > Anything else we'd need? I want to specially invite jesstess to remark
>> > on what else might make the event excellent. Everyone else too! -- what
>> > do you think of such a structure?
>> >
>> > One thing I will say about retention -- it'd be great if such an event
>> > were to cause lots of new people to arrive at a project and stick
>> >
>> indefinitely, but something I've learned by running sprints is that
>> > events often uncover a class of contributors who want to contribute, but
>> > basically only will at dedicated event times. So maybe the best thing to
>> > do is to see how many of the attendees show up to a follow-up event
>> > online, rather than assuming that they have totally vanished from the
>> > project if they stop being visible within a few weeks.
>> >
>> > -- Asheesh.
>>
>> Thanks for the note, Asheesh.  Your TODO list lines up with my intuition
>> as well.
>>
>> I'm cc'ing our QA Lead, Chris McMahon, who is arranging this sort of
>> participation -- on May 5th he'll be running an event with Weekend
>> Testers http://weekendtesting.com .  Chris, would you also like to
>> co-brand that event with OpenHatch?  The up side is: more potential
>> contributors.  The downside is: a large proportion of them will be
>> very
>> new to formal software testing and would need more handholding.
>>
>> --
>> Sumana Harihareswara
>> Volunteer Development Coordinator
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>>
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