QA/Community/Participation

How to improve Community involvement in QA

• Created by marcia on 9-26-08
  • This is a working draft. Feel free to contribute ideas!

1. Leverage the Community Giving program to make sure existing community triagers get test machines.

• As an example, I nominated Ria Klassen for the community giving program. She is one of our most active triagers but she does not have a Mac. Kurt Schultz is another individual that could be a candidate. We need to look closely at the top Bugzilla triagers and keep them engaged and supplied with the tools they need to be successful.

2. Build up some *new triagers* and improve community participation in Test and Bug Days

• Hold some “mock” test days events when we are at conferences (e.g. Seneca type events)
• Experiment with different days and times to get wider participation
• Make sure there is advance notice of events and a good calendar on QMO to reference for any test day/bug day event
• Make sure to tailor the bug days to focused areas that we need specific help in. I am not sure if we have really been doing that or leaving it wide open.
• Build up a Community Tiger Team that will help to run these events. That is what Asa did back in the early days of Bug Day. Right now Aleksej is doing that for Bug Days, but we need to recruit other volunteers.
• Try to recruit participants from events such as Mozilla EU Camp

3. Build up our existing platforms specific testing base by increasing the numbers that we have on our mailing lists.

• We currently have only 18 members on the mac list. By the end of the year I would like to increase that number significantly in preparation for Snow Leopard.
• Some ways to do this include posting in Mac and Vista specific forums, which is what I did to start the mac and vista qa lists.

4. Reward our community.

• For the individuals that work with us consistently, I would like to make sure that they get some unique schwag that no one else has. I want to do platform specific tshirts to give to community members that test in a particular area.
• Once the new QMO is in place, use the badging system to track contributors that are very active. We currently have QA specific bags and tshirts to reward community members.
• Elevate certain QMO contributors to be “experts” in their areas and then have them mentor new incoming contributors.

5. Participate in events outside the office where we can meet potential contributors

• Developer Days
  • We should try to have at least 2 Dev Days per year in different parts of the country. If US only, one on the east coast and one west coast.
• Recruiting Events
• Conferences, both global and local
• QA meetups in Mountain View, similar to what Mozilla labs does
• 2008 we made a good start, with Seneca test event and upcoming Moz EU Camp event