June 16, 2014

• Attendees: Anthony Hughes, Aaron Train
• Location: Anthony Hughes' Vidyo channel

Discussion

History

• Ill devised 'reinvigorate' test-days goal for devised for this quarter which was created earlier on based on prior conversations

Goal Ideas

• Focus on providing a roadmap and a set of curricula to help other community leads to start doing the "reinvigorating" of the test days throughout

Current Problems/Issues

• lack of accountability
  • no goal for the event creator, what are you trying to achieve from having the event and having people contribute
• lack of participation during North American business hours
  • lack of activity in the channel during these times -- need to create activity -- disincentivizes people to contribute
  • should broadcast, advertise event the day of across channels more
  • many people are at their day jobs during these times
  • lack of planning to drive the event forward throughout the day
• lack of "contributor ladder"
  • why are people coming? to learn? to contribute to the product -- this may be different for each product/project
  • the "ladder" may not necessarily be tied to the "testdays program" but to feed people into different projects
  • take inspiration from marketplace team -- a day to interface with mentors, including devs
  • those who are "trained" could become "trainers"
• lack of reward for testers, developers, engineers, etc
  • devs likely want more eyes on their product, filing bugs, etc
  • testers likely want to learn new skills, find bugs in product, provide feedback
    • thank testers for their contributions
    • do something with badges
• lack of incentive (what is the incentive?)
  • gear towards an easy introduction to the community, establish relationships with mentors
  • accustomed to tasks
  • open the event up to a broad range of tasks
  • pick up a set of valuable skills
• too much overhead in tracking contributors
  • needed for outreach, metrics, rewards, engagement
  • should be discussed more thoughtfully with the Community Champions
  • this is something where QA could really benefit from having a community manager
• difficult to keep contributors engaged long-term
• events feel "stale" because it's always Softvision making "firefox" testdays
• announcement and communication channels are inconsistent
• checklist not followed https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Test_Days/Checklist for communication
• avenues of broadcasting the event are stale
• testdays have become little more than "exploiting" volunteers to get some testing done, instead of an introductory, on-boarding, and educational mechanism to get volunteers involved in various projects -- testdays should be designed with what we can "teach" and less about what community can do for us -- the latter will come from the former

Define the "Ideal"

• need to define once we have a better idea of the current context

Ideas to get us from A to B

• redefine as an educational tool and a way to get people involved in different projects with some sort of "testing" component involved -- what defines "value" for testday may be different for each product/project
• take inspiration from marketplace team -- a day to interface with mentors, including devs
• what value do community members want to get from us?
• have a form or something so the broader community can contribute ideas
• testday event notice board?
• testday mailing list?
• QA training days?
  • yes
• Testday post-mortems?
  • communicate results/value of the event via subscribed list for contributors
  • communicate achievements through engineering meetings
• Periodic Testday program meetings?
  • need to have some way to check-in on project

Leveraging Tools

• IRC Channel: deprecate #testday channel and move it to #qa channel
• Testdaybot
  • what purpose do we want the bot to serve?
  • it could probably serve some of our problems like broadcasting
• Etherpad
  • Understanding what data we want recorded, is EtherPad the best tool?
• Wiki
  • revisit the checklist
  • revisit the testday templates
  • benefit is wiki is more searchable and less prone to overwrite
• One & Done
  • could every testday include a One&Done component?
  • better as a tool for people to complete tasks individually on their own time, not great to be utilized at an "event"
  • use it as a tool to create opportunity outside of the timeboxed period of an event
• Moztrap
  • query the community to see if it's a valuable tool and if not, what could we do to improve it?
  • see what the Moztrap team has on their roadmap -- Cameron is still running things (i think)
• QMO
  • today's event does not show up first
  • ideal would be for a QMO post to serve as the event notice, the test plan, and the communication channle (integrated IRC)
  • revisit/revise the Testday docs on QMO, make sure they are up to date
• Facebook/Twitter/etc
  • needs to be utilized more, perhaps Testdaybot could help
  • are there other social networks we should try to integrate?
• Other tools?
  • we should explore different avenues for communication and go where the people are
• Do we have too many tools?
• What are the use cases and can tools be integrated to minimize the overhead?
• how do we get to a single tool
• test the theory that organizing/maintaining testdays has too much overhead -- reach out to past organizers

Leveraging Community Programs

• ask Marcia, Michelle Marovich if there are community programs we could be utilizing to better support testdays

Leveraging other communities

• try running a testday in cooperation with Canonical (https://qa.ubuntu.com/ ) or Red Hat
• are there other communities we could be doing something similar with?
• what is the incentive for other communities to participate?

Leveraging other in-company successes for inspiration

• https://etherpad.mozilla.org/marketplace-day (Marketplace community testing I am told via Michelle Marovich has been highly successful these past few months)

Actions Items

• Anthony to document *this* meeting and the starting of our strategy, deliver in the Community meeting on Thursday -- recurring discussion item in the Champions meetings