Yesterday WebQA held a combined test day and meetup event in San Francisco. The idea was to bring everyone together to hack on our QA projects alongside us, and in return we would be able to share our own knowledge and experiences, and demonstrate how we test.
The team had managed to pull together over 50 tasks for the evening, ranging from simple beginner level to a few advanced ones, and using a variety of technologies and projects. As people arrived we encouraged them to slap on a name tag and grab a task.
Once we had everyone in the room (I think there were 18 of us in total) we gave a brief introduction from the team over some beer and pizza, and then the fun really started! Of course it didn’t all go smoothly, and we quickly realised that the entire python.org domain was unavailable, which meant that nobody could download the required Python packages, such as Selenium and pytest! Fortunately we found after a little scrambling that we could use the –use-mirrors command line argument to get us unstuck. In fact, we’ve now even added this to our test jobs running on Jenkins to hopefully make them a little more resilient to PyPI downtime, so in a way I’m glad we had the issues.
Not everyone was working on new tests, in fact Zac set up a mini grid of Android devices (tablets and mobile), and was giving demonstrations on running web tests on mobile. If you’ve not tried this yet then you should as it’s great fun – and the future is mobile, right?
We also had some great feedback on our documentation, which will soon lead to some further improvements and simplifications. I was really impressed when one of the attendees told me there were some issues with the documentation on our wiki, and then told me they just logged in and fixed it themselves. That’s totally the kind of involvement we’re encouraging and it’s so great to see if happening.
By the end of the evening we had three pull requests submitted (all for different projects), and I’m almost certain that number will increase as some of the other tasks were near completion. We’ll now work on reviewing those pulls and merging them in, and look forward to any more that come our way!
Finally, I want to say a huge thanks to everyone that was able to attend for making it such a great event. We all hope you enjoyed it as much as we did, and look forward to seeing you at future events (and on #mozwebqa on irc.mozilla.org). Oh and thanks to Kedo for the Ctrl+W keyboard shortcut for Terminal!