[Testing] Community testing meeting minutes, 2008-11-06

[Mel Chua]

Community test meeting #2 today! Thanks to everyone who came (and sorry 
we ran a minute over - I'll be better about this next time...) Ccing 
Chris and Marco since they were present but may not be on this list.

Logs and topics are linked from here: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Community_testing_meetings/2008-11-06

Highlights and questions for thought/discussion:

* We have a (very ugly, please help fix!) portal page, 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Community_testing, and a meetings portal page, 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Community_testing_meetings.

* Greg and Brian are trying out (on Speak and Paint respectively) our 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_test_an_Activity instructions - which 
are under severe amounts of construction... are there any volunteers 
here with exploratory test experience that can help write up this guide?

* How can we encourage smart testers to take ownership of specific 
Activities and do "deep" testing on them, and come up with their own 
criteria for and metrics of quality? (As opposed to having community 
testers spending their time being/recruiting drones to run through 
scripts.) Greg quoted Patton: "Don't tell people how to do things. Tell 
them what needs to be done, and let the surprise you with their 
ingenuity." (Seriously, this was a great discussion - please do read the 
logs to get the full blast - it starts around 17:28:29.)

* It was generally agreed that automation was a good idea for reducing 
drone-ness, which is boring. Ben and Mel will be dreaming up designs 
over the next week, and welcome help. Basically, "I'm a tester. I want 
to automate this boring thing. What is my ideal interface to do so / the 
most beautiful tool I could imagine for it?" One possible source of 
inspiration: Sugarbot.

* Everybody likes Joe's design which was the basis of our current 
semantic-mediawiki-based test case management system 
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_cases_8.2.0).

* Marco brought up some great questions about the tester/developer 
relationship. We need to make sure that good bugs get filed when a test 
fails, and that developers know about the testing going on for the 
things they're working on (actually, this should be a "people are using 
my work, yay!" motivation.)

* Suggestions for rewarding community testers: cookies, whippings, 
whipped creme cookies, beer, wine, vodka, *Russian* vodka (it's 
special!), Caribbean vacations... we'll see what we can do. ;)

Thanks to everyone who volunteered to take on something between now and
next week (gregdek, cjl, bjordan, adricnet) - check out action
items here: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Community_testing_meetings/2008-11-06#Action_items

We also agreed to move two conversations to email - prioritizing 
Activities to test, and then displaying testing metrics in motivating 
ways. So as to not flood everyone's inboxes, I'll ask Greg and Chris to 
bring these conversations up over the next few days. :)

-Mel