Proven tester wiki love

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Jul 7 00:44:53 UTC 2010


On Mon, 2010-07-05 at 19:33 -0500, Aaron Faanes wrote:
> I went to work a bit on jdulaney's fork of the proven tester page to
> make the mentorship-merging stuff fit a little more smoothly, and I
> sort of got carried away. I'd normally just add this as a new revision
> for Proven_testers, but it's pretty substantially revised. It probably
> needs to get re-reviewed:
> 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Dafrito/Proven_tester
> 
> I can write up a summary of the major differences, but I figure I
> should only toss out one wall-of-text at a time. ;) Basically, I took
> the current one, and tried to expand on places that were shallow (like
> testing criteria) and made other sections flow a lot better (like the
> old Feedback section).
> 
> I feel the need to mention I refer to critpath packages as just
> critical packages and critical updates, instead of critical path
> packages and critical path updates. This is purely a stylistic change:
> when I was reading it out loud, I trip over the alliteration of "path
> packages" a lot. Let me know if this (or anything else) is a mortal
> sin.

I understand - I've had the same feeling - but I think we may want to
stick with the 'critical path' naming, as it's what's used elsewhere in
Fedora-land.

I'm not absolutely in love with the 'stable update' concept introduced
here, to be honest. Personally I'd prefer to stick with the concept of
critical path functionality, and whether or not the update violates it.
I'll try and submit a proposed revision for this soon.

I quite like the overall layout of the page. But it's a lot wordier than
the existing version, and reads less like a clear set of instructions on
how to actually perform the proven tester function and more like an
abstract discussion of concepts that requires some work and
interpretation to actually put into practice. I'm not convinced that, if
I were a brand new proven tester applicant, I'd actually feel
particularly confident about exactly what it is I should be doing after
reading that page. In technical language terms, it switches voices quite
a lot. Using the passive voice tends to make sentences longer and harder
to interpret; I'd want to avoid stuff like:

"Neutral karma should be left in cases of an untestable or
insufficiently tested update." It just feels...squiggly, as someone
reading the page for instructions on what to do. I really like the short
sentences, active voice and use of 'you' that we have in the current
version of the page. It makes things a lot more direct.

Honestly, I have to say, I still prefer the current version of the page
over this proposed re-draft.

Do any of the current / recent proven tester applicants have a
preference?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net



More information about the test mailing list