Helping to improve advertising of test days and other things

[Jiri Eischmann]

Robyn Bergeron píše v Pá 17. 08. 2012 v 12:13 -0700:
> Hey,
> 
> So, I was just hanging out in the weekly kernel meeting on IRC, and 
> asked how their virtual fad for kernel regression testing went, and 
> heard that they had incredibly low turnout, and it was also noted that 
> test days in general kind of have low or less than we'd like to have 
> turnout.  Which seems like something we can help with, in a few ways:
> 
> #1: Work with the QA team to help them figure out how to get information 
> to us so that we can get it out to various channels - twitter, facebook, 
> etc. - and what information we'd need and when.
> 
> A lot of times, it seems like testing might sound daunting/"not for me" 
> when in reality, it might be easy or take 5 minutes or etc. So maybe 
> things we could ask for would be...
> 
> * How long does this take?
> * Is this "easy", "hard," ... what skills do you need?
> * Is this a "you just need a USB key and a way to download" or is this 
> potentially going to destroy your system?
> 
> For the kernel regression virtual fad - which wasn't really a test day - 
> as an example, it's (a) got the word "kernel" in it, which I think 
> automatically makes a lot of people say "uhoh, not for me," even though 
> there may have been ways for them to participate.
> 
> Anyway: it seems like something we could add value to - just with 
> something like, "Send us your info a week in advance, we'll work up some 
> tweets or content and help drive folks back to you."
> 
> #2: See if there are additional things we could produce that can help 
> people get acquainted with the idea or process of testing.
> 
> Maybe a video how-to? Not really sure here what would be valuable - 
> would be something to reach out to the QA folks about.
> 
> #3: Josh Boyer added in the kernel meeting that it would be cool to just 
> have a "Boot the rawhide kernel today. Does it work? Tell us why or why 
> not" type of thing - I don' tknow if that would be targeted as a once a 
> week type thing, or what. Maybe this would be an interesting thing to 
> tackle - how can we help them make this sound less daunting/more 
> friendly, get the word out, and have fun with it? Maybe a quick 
> screencast of how to walk through this type of thing from start to finish?
> 
> Thoughts, comments? Anyone willing to reach out to either QA or the 
> kernel folks to pick their brains on this one?

I've been thinking about how to improve test days promotion for some
time. A few thoughts:

If we want to have more people testing Fedora we need to have
appropriate infrastructure first. Frankly, wiki is not scalable for
receiving test results. It's OK if you have 10-15 participants
throughout the day, but it's PIA if you have more. There were about 40
people participating in the power management test day and they had
serious problems to submit results (conflicts all the time). Not
mentioned that for some people, editing wiki is not very friendly. I
spoke about this with the QA guys so much that they started working on
some submitting system, but it's just at the beginning and doesn't have
a high priority for them.

Real (not online) events might be worth exploring. We did it for the F17
power management test day during our office's open house. It was by far
the most attended test day and people were enjoying testing Fedora
together and with people that have the best insight in to the area (our
power management engineers in this case).

We have to talk about them more. People that represent Fedora should
blog about it, talk about it at conferences, post announcements at
national community sites etc. If I and Jaroslav Reznik attend a general
Linux conference in our region we propose a talk "How To Contribute to
Fedora Project" and it's mostly about test days because testing is an
entry level contribution everyone can do. We go through test cases with
people and show them it's actually quite easy to take part in test days.
And we tell them that testing prior to the final release is very
important.

Red Hat opened an intern position in Brno office for someone who would
coordinate test days promotion. Unfortunately, they haven't yet found a
good fit, a student who is a Fedora enthusiast and interested in
testing. 

Jiri