'Joining in' wiki page draft

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Feb 11 18:12:06 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 06:33 -0500, Leam Hall wrote:
> Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote:
> > Adam Williamson wrote:
> >> On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 22:23 -0600, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> >>> It's good enough for now, imho. It's better than what we have. Thanks.
> >>
> >> Wow, I'll try not to let that go to my head ;)
> >>  
> > Hum.. I would like you to shrink it more :)
> > 
> > Cant you trim it down to
> > would explain in more detail what they are.
> 
> Edited the Reporting, Triage, and Rawhide sections. Adam, feel free to 
> complain.  :)

OK, I have merged our stuff. :)

Here's some detailed reasoning on what stuff of yours I reverted or
revised. I did keep quite a few of your changes, so thanks for those :)
Reading the diff:

https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=User:Adamwill/Draft_Join&diff=77642&oldid=77567

will probably make this easier to follow.

I wanted to keep the idea of people being "already involved in" QA
because it sets the bar as low as possible - it's so easy to join QA
that you're probably already doing it.

I am trying to avoid the concept of 'team membership' as much as
possible. It's actually a barrier to entry, IMHO. It smells like a
clique. I think it's more welcoming for new contributors to just see QA
as a set of tasks they can help out with rather than a special 'group'
or 'team' of people they need to pass some mysterious standard to become
a 'member' of. If people strongly disagree we can change this back to
Leam's version, but I'm just not sure it's a helpful concept in our
current situation.

I dropped 'Zapping' based on a chat I had with poelcat the other day. He
doesn't really like the 'Zappers' bit of the name, and I agree, because
it's a bit misleading. The 'Bugzappers' don't actually zap bugs, that's
what the developers do. They try and organize Bugzilla and take care of
things so that developers can zap bugs more efficiently. So it's just
not an accurate term in this case.

Again, "experienced BugZappers" reads like a barrier to entry. We're
trying to make people feel like they can get involved. If anyone in the
Bugzappers group is scared that they'll wind up with a bunch of clueless
newbies trying to manage kernel bugs, please shout, but my feeling is
it's not likely to happen.

I'm afraid I completely reverted the Rawhide section to mine. This is
something I haven't fully brought to the list yet - my apologies for
that, it's in the works - but one thing I'm trying to push (and jlaska
and wwoods and quite a few others too agree with) is that we need to
heavily increase participation in Rawhide. Testing of the development
version should be a huge part of testing a distribution in general; for
Fedora it currently really isn't, and that's a significant weakness. As
I said, I'll be posting a more fleshed-out version of this idea soon,
but basically, I think it's not a good thing that the Fedora community
tends to set the Rawhide bar really high, by saying things like 'if
you're a RHCT/RHCE'. You don't *have* to be an RHCT/RHCE to run a
development distro, you just have to know vaguely what the hell you're
doing, be tenacious, and have a machine (or virtual machine) that it
doesn't matter *too* much if you lose. There were quite a few people
running Mandriva Cooker who really were nowhere near ninja-level guys.
They tended to ask a lot of questions, but fundamentally their systems
kept running from day to day and the universe didn't end. I'm aware that
Rawhide at present really is pretty raw and not as good as MDV's,
Ubuntu's or even OpenSUSE's development distros, but it's still not
constructive to basically put it behind big 'DO NOT TOUCH' signs. If
more people get involved with it, then its quality will improve.

On the location of the link to the 'Rawhide' page - that's a flow thing.
You set the link at a point where people don't actually know what
Rawhide is. In my version, the reader is given a clear cue why they
should click on the link - to find out how to install Rawhide. In your
version, they're not actually given a clear cue why they would click on
it as they read, and in my experience, people tend to click links *as
they read* the text, they're less likely to go back and click a link
from earlier in a paragraph (or even a sentence).

Finally, James - I reverted your edit. I'm intending (once we have
agreement on this page) to create QA/TestCase as a real page. I don't
think a category page is enough - we need a page that just clearly
explains what a test case is, what we use them for, and why and how you
might want to create one.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




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