QMO quality.mozilla.org (alpha)

I am starting this thread so that we have a place to collectively share ideas and give feedback on others' ideas about how we can get more people involved with QA.

Let me start off by saying that I believe we have a largely untapped resource available to us, 1st year college students.  Just by the shear number of interns in Mountain View this summer, 21 by my count, the student community provides a lot of great talent in all areas.  As it stands, most of the interns have been involved in the Mozilla community for a while now.  Myself, I have only been involved since March 2007.  I think that we can get much more help with the Mozilla project by getting word out to students.  I believe that most students are unaware of the Mozilla project and how they can become involved.  Before I got involved with Mozilla, I second guessed my coding skills and was reluctant to participate in the community.  I had no idea about the many other opportunities available.

The largest reason I became involved with Mozilla was that I was given the opportunity to take a one week crash course in Mozilla and the open source community.  This course was organized and instructed by Dave Humphrey at Seneca College in Toronto, where I am currently enrolled.  It was a real quick and dirty view of what Open Source technology was, what Mozilla was all about, and different ways one could contribute to the Mozilla community.  Some of the topics we were introduced to in this course were:

• Intro to Open Source (GPL, Linux, etc)
• Building FF from source (CVS, Make)
• Dev Tools, Web Tools (LXR, Bonsai, Bugzilla, pastebin, IRC, QMO)
• Intro to XPCOM
• Debugging C++/JS
• QA/Litmus
• Intro to making Extensions (XUL, JS)
• and on the final day of the course, we all participated in a testday

I think making more courses like this available through other schools would be an excellent tool.  There was a high demand for this course at Seneca.  On the first day we had almost 50 people but Dave had to turn away half of them because there was just not enough room in the class.  I know of at least three of us from that class that are now involved in the Mozilla community to a certain degree.

Another idea I have is that we need to get word out to other students.  This being, students just graduating from high school.  Often, in Ontario, the colleges and universities send around representatives to high schools to show the students what their school is about and ultimately to persuade the students to apply to their establishment.  I think that it would be a good idea, just to get awareness out there to high school students, if we could provide information in some capacity to the students that attend these "school fairs".

I would now like to briefly talk on some ideas that Dave Humphrey brought to my attention.  These are his thoughts, paraphrased, about what he has found to be effective and critical to both creating and continuing the Mozilla community at Seneca College.

The first thing is to set up local Mozilla communities at schools like the one at Seneca with a dedicated IRC channel.  This allows for students to communicate and support each other.  It also allows Mozilla people to help out and support people as they start to learn more about Mozilla.  Just like the code behind Firefox, it can be a bit overwhelming trying to understand everything and trying to find where you fit in.  From my point of view, having Dave, other students, and the Mozilla QA community there to both help me and push me is the reason I am here today.

The second item is to have one or two dedicated and motivated people that others can gather around.  We accomplish this to a certain extent at Seneca through Club Moz , but this comes with its' own challenges.  First off, Club Moz is run by students for students.  The major challenge here is the high turn around time.  At the very best, we only have members in the club for four years (the time from enrollment to graduation), and this doesn't factor in the drop-outs.  Once a student has graduated, they are no longer part of the school and thus cannot be involved in the club.  In an ideal world, we would have motivated fourth year students trying to bring up first year students with second and third year students supporting them.  This is why we need dedicated and motivated people on the ground.  Another reason we need dedicated people on the ground to support these communities is that it is a full-time job.  Dave spends countless hours a day interacting with the community and working to make it progress.  He also teaches at the school.  Where does he find the time?...

The third item Dave mentioned to me, and his favourite, is to have a full-length course available as part of the curricullum at schools.  Dave teaches such a course, titled "Topics in Open Source Development".  The course overview can be found here.  From what I know about the course, it gets students involved in the open source community using Mozilla as a model.  Students can even work on existing Mozilla community projects to earn credit for this course.  Dave find the course method is most effective if he dedicates two hours of course time per week to lab sessions.  It creates a large captive group that can support each other and allows Dave to push people to do more and become more involved.

The fourth point Dave made to me was that overcoming entry barriers by building an environment of encouragement, putting in lots of IRC time to help students get over the initial hurdle of getting into what Mozilla is all about, and helping people when they get stumped is an effective tool as well.

I think the first priority for us to get more people involved in QA at Mozilla is to get key people on the ground (students and professors) interested in supporting a local community.  QA or otherwise.  The majority of students are ignorant as to the many avenues available to them in the software industry.  I know I was!  Getting the word out is key. Also,I think that all the lessons learned by Dave and everything that he has accomplished can be mirrored to many other schools across the globe.

For my part, since I have been learning a lot more about QA at Mozilla first hand, I will start to become much more involved in Club Moz at Seneca and helping to promote the community at Seneca. Dave and I will probably be discussing some of the ideas that pop up here.

That is all I had to say on this.  Now it is your turn.  Let's open the floodgates to feedback, other ideas, and discussion.

Cheers!