A New Era for Testdays

Anthony Hughes

1

I’m writing today to announce the transition to a new era for testdays.

The Feedback is In

A while back I had written a post announcing that we were starting a process to retool testdays. We had admitted to ourselves that the current model wasn’t working for various reasons, not least of which was declining value for participants. We decided that the best way to reverse this tide was to begin with tearing down our preconceived notions of what testdays were and to begin brainstorming ideas for what testdays should be. And so we kicked off a cycle purely focused on collecting feedback from you, the community at large.

We believe its important for testdays to focus on providing contributors with the tools needed to contribute long-term and that getting help with testing is a natural side-effect of successful engagement. We believe in strengthening community relationships and broadening our outreach.

Several weeks ago we asked anyone and everyone to start giving us feedback about testdays by entering ideas into an etherpad. Each week we reviewed the feedback and integrated your ideas into the strategy. We’ve received a lot of great ideas that we’re excited to try out and given that the amount of incoming feedback has subsided, we think it’s a good time to shift gears.

Next Steps

We are now going to begin building a new type of testday modeled off some of the key themes that emerged from your feedback. Over the next few months we’ll be focused on experimenting with new ideas and analyzing the results of these experiments. Each and every experiment will be looked at as a teachable moment, even failed experiments will have a story to tell and a lesson to learn.

The first of these events will be focused on “mentorship”. The idea is to hold an event that focuses on engaging new contributors by teaching them the skills necessary to be effective testers within Mozilla, and to allow core contributors to engage as educators in their own right. We’re still in the planning stages for this event but intend to hold the event within the next few weeks.

I want to reiterate that this should be seen as a transitional period. We don’t want to stop all the great work that is currently happening with events like Testdays and Bugdays. If you’re currently involved with those events I encourage you to remain engaged in those events. However, you may see one or two of these events skipped over the next few weeks as we refocus some of our energies to our first “mentorship” testday. You may also see the frequency of these traditional events decline as we become more successful and seek to ramp up the new experimental events.

How Can You Help?

If you’d like to help us plan this event, it will be our top discussion item for the next several meetings. You can be involved by joining our meeting (details below).

When: Tuesday @ 1pm PDT (UTC -7)
Video conference: https://v.mozilla.com/flex.html?roomdirect.html&key=WBuu8ks3P4IZ
Vidyo room: Anthony Hughes (or click the link above ^)
Telephone: +1 (800) 707-2533 p369 x99007
IRC: irc.mozilla.org #qa

If you’re not able to attend the meeting then please add your ideas, questions, or concerns to this etherpad.

Of course, there are more ways to help:

  • Read our wiki, including the strategy linked within
  • Provide feedback on this new direction
  • Contribute ideas for experiments you think we should try
  • Participate in an upcoming bugday or testday

I’m looking forward to see what we can create by working together on this new era for testdays.

One response

  1. celal wrote on ::

    Each week we reviewed the feedback and integrated your ideas into the strategy ??
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