My task for the next ~6 months

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-02-20 at 16:56 -0500, Samuel Greenfeld wrote:
> I had a similar conversation on test cases while trying to plan for an
> upcoming test day:
> 
> http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/testing/2012-February/002609.html
> 
> In general, it might be useful to know how skilled most test day
> participants are at testing, as well as the test approach preferred by
> the Fedora project as a whole when planning these events.

It's kind of an impossible question to answer, because there isn't a
'typical Test Day participant'. There's very few people who just plan to
show up to every test day (I used to, but don't always make it these
days).

More often, people will show up to one or two specific test days that
interest them. Generally, the more specific and, er, esoteric your
topic, the more you can assume those who show up will be skilled and
already knowledgeable.

Sugar is a pretty general topic and I suspect has substantial 'pull' for
your casual bystander - the kind of person who reads the announcement
and thinks 'hey, that sounds fun' - so, as Johann suggested, I'd say
it's probably safest to assume quite a low level of knowledge /
expertise in writing test cases for a Sugar test day. In general, it's
usually safer to err on the side of caution (assuming little knowledge).
The only real drawback to assuming little knowledge is that it may make
your test case come out very long - that might annoy a few people a
little bit, but that's really all. The drawback to assuming too much
knowledge is that you wind up making it impossible for some otherwise
willing testers to participate, which is obviously a much bigger
drawback.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net