Wow, thanks Chris for this great feedback!
In May we collaborated with the Weekend Testers (Americas)[1]
I love the name! They also seem to have an interesting history in term of organic community growth.
In June we collaborated online with Openhatch.org
participants from the previous test event with WTA helped out, so there was
a mix of skill and experience among the testers, and several people remarked about how they had not expected to have so much fun.
I'm very interested in reading more about this session!
What would you say was the main expertise/know-how that the OpenHatch team brought? How would you say they brought the fun in testing?
Also, does the OpenHatch process guide people of varied skills, or did you set up a set of pre-requisites?
We would like to do some more sessions like these. One strong suggestion is to have a test event addressing outstanding Bugzilla issues for particular extensions. This could be an ongoing exercise, either in collaboration with other groups or as a pure-Wikipedia exercise.
A regular test day could anchor the idea. Maybe "Monthly Test 13th", so there would be added luck ;-)
About the two events you had, did you somehow also regroup in-person, say 2 or 3 testers together, or was everybody at home?
I think improving unit testing would be a great ongoing project.
I'm probably brain-washed by the test driven developers I met, but I'm under the impression that there is no downside to better tests! (I'm a purely hobbyist coder myself, learned when I was a kid and along the way, so I took a *lot* of bad patterns and habits. Never learned to write a test before writing functional code, obviously. But I'm seeing the way, now ;-)
Julien