From casual observation, it seems that more people like announcing they are a new Bugzapper than being a new general QA volunteer for Fedora.
Besides the cool name, what causes this?
While I am not a Bugzapper, it would seem to me that QA runs on strict cycles. A new build comes out, and everyone is asked to test it in a timely manner. A test day for X is held on day Y and if you are not available on Y (give or take a day) you may feel that no one will look at your results.
Meanwhile a Bugzapper sounds like they do not have to install anything if they do not want to verify a fix. They can go through Bugzilla at their leisure. Their changes appear in realtime and they can immediately feel they made a difference.
But given I primarily work on a downstream Fedora Remix, there is only so much time I have to do upstream QA. It takes time to research each update fedora-easy-karma says needs feedback so I can determine if I can personally test the fix(es). And there is no guarantee that what I do makes a difference; many updates get pushed because someone says "works for me" or the maintainer pushes on a timeout.
Most times when I file ABRT reports it seems like I hit duplicates.
So how can we get people involved with Fedora QA and make them feel good about it? Unfortunately I do not have a good answer. I agree with your comments about advertising and trying to better explain how long it takes to do individual tasks. But I personally wouldn't see virtualization as "Kind of Easy".
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SJG
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 3:56 AM, Robyn Bergeron <rbergero@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 08/23/2012 01:07 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:Yeah, I feel like the wiki isn't really a barrier, except maybe from the point of view of someone who might be interested and just sees a reallllly long list (speaking more to TC/RC testing, not really test days) and is overwhelmed and runs.
On 2012-08-22 19:18, Arnav Kalra wrote:
Maybe you can try making a simple SQL database in which people post
their results. It should have different tables for different test
days. This would allow you to easily sort the data and would not be
very difficult to implement.
The advertisement part is easy to do but I think your main problem is
collection of data and making that data easily accessible to users.
It...really isn't that simple, unfortunately. I wrote an overview a few days back on devel@, so I'll just link to that:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2012-July/170437.html
The 'edit your results into a wiki table' approach certainly isn't the perfect answer to managing test day results, but making it better is a more complex problem than it might appear. In practice, I don't think it's something that's a massive dampener on people's willingness to participate in test days, though we don't really have any evidence either way on that, so it all comes down to gut feeling...
Advertisement may be easy but a lot of it really has to do with being able to keep the person captive who was already interested when they clicked the link. Maybe it's worth thinking about having something in the InfoBox on the wiki that says "how easy it is" - maybe with some sort of matching page of criteria for 3 or 4 levels of ease - SuperEasy being "I can boot from a USB key into a desktop", Kind of Easy being "I can boot from a USB key into a desktop and also use virtualization," etc.
And then going back to ... well, stuff that crosses over to thinks marketing could maybe help with, and would be useful when doing the actual advertising... "New to testing? Watch this shiny 5-minute video," "Why is testing important?" ... "How you can help out in XXX minutes or less," kind of stuff. I think people often are willing to do things, and are looking for short-duration ways to help out, and maybe they aren't aware that test days or validation tests can be a good place to do that. Or they don't know when getting to the test day page, or test matrix, if they're going to need 20 minutes, or a day.
Maybe something to do would be to work with infra around the time of the next test day or even as we move towards another RC test round, and as we advertise in our normal ways (ie: QA folks blog that it's happening) see if we can figure out how many times the wiki page is being accessed - if we're getting lots of hits but not a lot of turnout, maybe it's confusing, but if we're not getting hits, maybe it's just that we're not making enough noise, or the same people see it many times and sort of phase it out.
-r
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