On Thursday, March 31, 2011 00:37:11 Tony Su wrote:

Hello Andreas,

The proposal was created only after I heard that openSUSE expressed a need for expanding the pool of people willing to test software.

I probably put the cart before the horse if there isn't consensus on this need.

Looking just on the document you wrote together, I missed the context and what you want. It was too high level ;)

But, if openSUSE really does need more Users involved in the Development Cycle then based on my experience and in conversations with other openSUSE fans, then common issues typically involve

- Connecting Dev with Testers. In other words, somewhere a Dev has to be able to say "I've just written this bit of code which needs to be tested in a such and such way" and people who are willing to test have to know where to see it, be able to obtain the code and be able to test in a meaningful way. Does this all exist now somewhere I don't know(besides just throwing the code out there in Factory)?

This is possible via features.opensuse.org, fate has entries for that - but most developers are not doing that right now and therefore testers do not use it either. So, do we need other tools - or better documentation on how to do that?

- As is typically the case, besides experienced Testers, there are others who might be willing to do some testing. Is there a published guide introducing them to the world of testing? Is there a published guide stating what is expected from Testers?

This sounds usefull. I do not have details but suggest you talk with the testing team on this overall proposal on the opensuse-testing mailing list.

Also, for whomever actually manages overall development (Is that Holder Sickenberg?), has a profile been created that describes what is

Holger manages one Novell QA team and thus is active in openSUSE.

desired to do testing? Depending on management style, I can easily envision wanting to cull prospects... Sometimes no matter the enthusiasm some people just might not have the talent and be worthwhile to use for certain tasks.

Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager openSUSE, aj@{novell.com,opensuse.org} Twitter: jaegerandi | Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-boosters+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-boosters+help@opensuse.org

On 2011-03-31 Henne wrote:

Hey,

by the amount of occurrences of the word "testing" can you please move this discussion to the opensuse-testing list?

Once you have everything figured out and have actionable tasks we can help you with don't hesitate to let us know! We will see what we can do then. But for now I don't think the Boosters are the right crowd for this discussion. The openSUSE Testing team is.

Henne

Tony, another tip: it seems like a big plan, I'd scale it down. A big plan means it would need a decent dedicated team (say 3-5 volunteers at least) to make it happen. As everyone is busy on things THEY consider higher priority, this is unlikely to happen - as usual. That's how it works in a FOSS project. Now people might say - do it, and some might join to help you. But for that, such a huge project is not fun: if you'd do it alone, in your free time, well - you're busy too. And working on something that won't bear any fruits for a long time (if ever) is just not nice. So try to go for some small improvements to the current processes while keeping the big picture in the back of your head. You're much more likely to find ppl to help you with small, easily digestable and obviously beneficial tasks. Then in time, the big dream you had will suddenly be only a few steps away ;-) Cheers, Jos